RSS Awareness Day
May 1, 2008
May 1st, rent is due (for most of us) and today is also RSS Awareness Day. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. This is a way that information is “fed” into a presentable way that could be custom tailored by you, the user. Information can consists of news, blog entries and other frequently updated content. One way to explain this is when you watch CNN on television, you have up to date news, stock prices, sports scores and other tidbits of information. Now think of this for the Internet. You can subscribe to blogs that you read, podcasts that you listen to and news reports; all tailored to your own whims. Another example is on Facebook. When you first login, you come to the “notification page”, this page has recent activities of your friends on Facebook. This is an example of a feed.
Perhaps you have seen the little orange button on websites with the white arches, the one on the right side of my blog column? This is the RSS symbol, which you can click on to subscribe (and this is not a plug to subscribe to my blog, REALLY. But you can, if you want). But first, you need a program called an RSS reader, feed reader, or sometimes called an RSS aggregator. I use Newsfox, which is an add-on to my web brower, Firefox, but there are many other programs you can use, too. Then it’s as easy as subscribing through the RSS reader and whenever information is updated, it will appear in your reader. Easy as 1-2-3.
Until next time…
