RSS Explained

For those of you unfamiliar with RSS you no doubt will have seen the standard RSS button on websites and wondered what it was. RSS is essentially an internet web feed format designed to share web content such as blogs, news, audio, video and a variety of other on-line content. RSS mostly stands for "Really Simple Syndication" but is sometimes referred to as "Rich Site Summary". In this article I would like to take a closer look at RSS, what it does, and how it can help your business.

The typical internet user may have several sites or more that they frequent for their content. They may visit Yahoo News, CNN and The Wall Street Journal for current events. They may also visit several entertainment or personal interest sites like PGA.COM or MLB.COM in addition to trade related sites like Hwy52.com. This ad hock method of information retrieval is very inefficient and can be quite time-consuming.

RSS offers people a way to aggregate the content from all the sites they visit, so they can save time by not having to visit each site individually in order to get the information they need. All their content is made available in one location by way of a "feed reader" or "aggregator". There are several popular feed readers on the market and most are free. Newsgator has feed reader products for your desktop and for your mobile device that work really well. Also very popular are the free feed readers provided by Google and Yahoo.

To be able to view content from your favourite site in a feed reader or newsreader the publishing site must "syndicate" their content. All the sites I mentioned above provide RSS feeds or "syndicate" much of their content. Look for the RSS symbol as it usually provides a link to an RSS feed and is a sure sign that RSS feeds are available.

At Hwy52 Media we provide several RSS feeds of our content the most notable being of our press release section.

If you are new to RSS consider giving it a try and begin to enjoy the time saving benefits RSS has to offer. If you already take advantage of RSS please subscribe to one or more of our feeds today!