RSS Awareness Day

Once again it pays to read Men With Pens first thing in the morning - today’s post tells me that today is RSS Awareness Day!  In addition to their own bits of wisdom on the topic, James and Harry have pointed out a site created by the folks at Daily Blog Tips called RSSDay.org.  It includes a good little tutorial on Really Simple Syndication (the RSS acronym “exploded”).

For my part, I’m going to include excerpts from a newspaper article that I wrote a few months ago about RSS.  I use RSS quite a bit, but there’s a lot more that I could do with it.  Anywhere you see the orange RSS symbol, you can subscribe.  It’s not just for blogs!

Here’s the article.  Feel free to pass it along to anyone that you think might benefit from this extremely useful technology!

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Would you like to have your favorite websites send all of their new stories to you instead of you having to check each website separately? Did you know that there are subscription services available on the Internet, just like newspaper and magazine subscriptions, which will send you their latest news? Read on for the details!

News aggregators, or news readers, are websites that you can use to view articles and news stories in a single location. Instead of having to visit 50 websites each day, you can read their articles and stories within a single website. It’s just like signing up for a subscription to your favorite newspapers and magazines and then having them delivered directly to you! Talk about convenience!

The underlying technology that enables this subscription service is called syndication. Syndication has existed in news media for many years as a means to distribute content. Famous writers and columnists like Dave Barry, Garrison Keillor, Dear Abby, and Ann Landers don’t write for a single newspaper. They write their columns, submit them to a syndicated news organization (or syndicate), and then their columns are published by many newspapers who purchase their columns from the syndication company.

Web syndication is similar in concept to news syndication in that websites can format or transmit their articles so they can be distributed to thousands or millions of readers. These articles are automatically published in a format that other websites can read and publish for them. The most popular form of Web syndication uses a technology called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). News readers are designed to allow you to track these RSS feeds within a single website. All you have to do is copy and paste the links to these websites into your news reader and presto, you’ll start getting their stories.

RSS works for many different kinds of websites. In addition to every major newspaper or magazine in the world, you can also subscribe directly to blogs. Most blogging systems will automatically take these blog articles, or posts, and create RSS feeds for them. You can “subscribe” to dozens, hundreds, even thousands of these websites using your news reader.

If you’d like to read a more detailed subscription of how to use RSS, you can check out this article.

I’ve used three different Web-based news readers and they all work well. You can check them out at the following websites:

Google Reader

Bloglines

Netvibes

You can now simplify your web browsing by limiting the number of websites that you have to visit. This can save you time and effort when you want to stay up to date on news and current events.

Many different kinds of websites can be viewed using your news reader. Check for the terms “RSS” or “subscribe” on a website to see if it’s available for subscription. You might be surprised at the amount of information that can be sent to your preferred news reader!

Next time you run across a blog or website that you really enjoy, check for the RSS button and subscribe; both you and the author will benefit!

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