RSS is a relatively new thing on the Internet and many people don’t know what it it or how to use it. According to Wikipedia, Syndication means that, you allow your website, or a portion of it, to be available for other sites to use.  This means, "…making web feeds available from your site, or blog, in order to provide other people with a summary of your website’s recently added content (for example, the latest news or forum posts)."

RSS and Atom are the two main syndication formats.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a format for delivering regularly changing web content.  The purpose of RSS is to make it easier for you to stay on top of websites that you are interested in by receiving the latest content in your feed reader.  The nice thing about RSS is that you don’t have to visit every site individually and don’t have to join each site’s newsletter to get the latest and greatest information.

Big sites like Yahoo News, the US government, and thousands of newspapers across the world are providing RSS news feeds for anyone.  They do this simply because what they have on their websites interest different people in different ways.  They want to provide a way for users to get the most relevant content that they are interested in.

RSS benefits both the readers of the feed and the publishers of the feed.  When a person or company updates their blog or website, or wants to announce a new sales price or bonus on a particular item, the readers of the feed will know about the change immediately and can decide whether or not they are going to come to your site to read more about it.

What is an RSS feed? 

An RSS feed is a program that notifies you when a website or a blog that you frequently visit has been updated with new content. 

What is a feed reader?

A feed reader is a piece of software that allows you to get the RSS feeds from different websites or blogs that you are interested in.  The feed reader pulls the newest content from those sites and displays it so you can quickly read it , see if you are interested in it, and use the information the way you want to use it.

One of the most popular feed readers is Google Feedreader and it is the feed reader that I and my colleagues currently use.

Those two terms are merely names for the software that allows you to get the RSS feeds from websites or blogs that interest you and have it displayed so you can read it and use the information the way you want to use it.  It is important to find one that you like and that works for you.  You can find about 15 different feed reader options by clicking here.

How do I subscribe to an RSS feed?

Smart blogs make it very easy for you to subscribe to their RSS feeds.  Most of the time on these blogs you will see little buttons that say ‘RSS’ or sometimes it will say ‘XML’ or ‘ATOM’.  You can click on those and it will walk you through the steps needed to subcribe.  The common, most universal symbol for RSS is an orange box with three diagonal white lines.  Sometimes you might see a little button with a subscription count, if you click on that, you will be able to subscribe as well.

Smart browsers, like FireFox, also make it very easy to subscribe to an RSS feed.  If a site has an RSS feed, you will see an orange or blue icon to the far right of a site’s URL.  If you click on that, you will be able to subscribe.  In order to make that feature work, you will need to set up your preferred RSS reader in your internet browser.  You should go to preferences and then select Google Reader, or whatever you want your feeds to be displayed in.

If you are still not sure how to subscribe to an RSS feed, you can always copy the blog or website’s URL and paste it into your reader.  This is what it looks like in Google Reader.

Why Should You Bother Subscribing?

First of all, it is much simpler!  Blogs like ours want to share information with others to make your life simpler.  We all know that our time and energy is precious and you don’t want to carelessly waste your time.

Subscribing to RSS feeds makes your life more simple because:

1. It saves you lots of time!  Instead of spending your whole morning going to all of the websites or blogs that you enjoy to read, they come to you.  Better yet, they only come to you when they have something new that you are interested in!  How much easier could it get?

2.  It saves you mental energy!  Instead of remembering every site that you want to read every day, they are all sitting in your RSS reader for a quick glance.

3. More and more blogs and websites are providing extra perks for their RSS subscribers.  They might offer extra information, free downloads, e-books, and other things that are only available through their RSS.

So, what should you do now?

1. Sign up for an account to get an RSS reader so you can start subscribing to RSS feeds.

2. Subscribe to our RSS feed and any other site’s that you have interest in.

3. Link to this post, or email it to your mailing list if you think that your blog or website readers would like to know more about RSS.  You can also take a moment to share their on Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, or any other bookmarking sites by using the buttons below.

Learn to use this new technology today and enjoy the benefits you will receive from it!