I had a friend of mine recently ask what RSS was and why she would want to use it as a subscriber. (You know - those little orange radio wave looking things that are on every blog and podcast.) Seems she had gone onto Wikipedia and other sites to figure it out and nothing made sense. I remember doing this too when I first learned about RSS. Nothing made sense. I thought that some of you might also share this confusion. So I'm going to share with you what I used to explain it to her.
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Syndication" which is like setting up TiVo. You use a reader (like Google Reader, My MSN, or My Yahoo) and you tell it what you want to read by subscribing to the RSS feed for different sites. For instance, I might like to read The New York Times, the Speaking of Real Estate Blog put out by NAR, The Onion blog, and see what the White House is saying today. So I would go and subscribe through the RSS reader for each of those sites. Then I would open my reader program each morning and read what those sites had to say that day, rather than having to go to each site individually to get the information.
It's like having your own personal clipping service that only sends you the stuff you care about. Who knew it could be just that simple?
I hope this helps!
RSS Submission Tips - Is RSS Distribution Worth the Effort? How to Combine RSS Feeds Using Yahoo Pipes RSS Feeds - Why Your Website Should Have One What Does RSS Stand For?
0 comments:
Post a Comment