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RSS, Feeds, and Aggregators
When you work online all the time, immersed in bits and bytes,
hands automatically resting on the keyboard, where the lingua
franca is a mish-mash of acronyms and abbreviations - it is easy
to forget that the average person has no clue what we talk about.
It can be very daunting for the Internet neophyte with all these
terms, technology and hardware. That's why I wrote this. Because
I don't want people to be afraid to either ask (via comments on
this thread) or to click/use buttons they don't know or use.
Way back when I started blogging (6-7 months ago!), I was a
complete n00b in these blogging terms too. Now while I'm not
exactly the lead programmer at RSS central I do know a thing or
two, but when I really think about it I'm only just paddling at
the moment so maybe I can help others get into the paddling pool
too!
RSS
Really Simple Syndication, let's break it down into the real
basics. It is essentially a broken down look at the web
page/site, stripping all the presentation and layout, and
removing all the neat graphics and cool toys that generally
clutter webpages. What's left is an RSS file (in XML format).
Surprisingly out of 1,000 blog readers (who are themselves a
small elite minority among Internet users) 66% have not even
heard of RSS and 23% said they understood but did not use it.
Where do you stand?
Feeds
This is just a another way of writing what RSS can do. Feeds
are a blog's (or site's) method of syndicating content, arranged
concisely in an XML format and, as mentioned above, stripped of
any extraneous presentation. The "feed" comes from aggregators
requesting that RSS file to display as content for their
subscribers (feeding their need for your well-written
articles!).
Aggregators
It's a straightforward description for what it is: it
aggregates RSS feeds from whatever source you tell it. These are
also sometimes called "newsreaders" although this term is falling
out of favor.
There are two types: software and web-based. Software has a
following - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators#Desktop_news_aggregators,
but web-based is beginning to draw more of the usage. Rapidly
expanding online aggregators such as http://www.bloglines.com/,
or http://my.yahoo.com/ are leading the way. With blog traffic up
31 percent since the beginning of the year, readers will need a
way to sort through the blogosphere, and aggregators are that
way.
The main advantage of aggregators is that they allow you to
gather all your feeds in one place, and read them without having
to navigate all over the place.
Adding Your Feed
You will have noticed button labeled RSS, often times they are
orange rectangles (they are also labeled XML). That is the feed
button - clicking it will show a lot of XML code. Note the URI,
copy it. Then go to your aggregator, software or web-based, and
paste that URI as the feed address and save. That will allow the
aggregator to know where to fetch the feed and it will do it
automatically from that point on.
What's The Advantage?
A big advantage to RSS is that you, the subscriber, is in
control. Let's say you go to xyz.com and look for an article on
Blogging software. You find it, but there are advertising
banners, fly-ins, pop-ups, and then just as annoying you have to
click three or four times to go to the "next page" with yet more
of the same. With a feed (and appropriate aggregator) you get
just the article (content) without all of the extra stuff.
The Future of RSS
So what is in store for us with RSS? I don't have a crystal
ball but some things are plain to see. The future of RSS is
bright and yet at the same time likely to be mired in
specification wars, mainly due to Microsoft's insistence that
they rename RSS to 'web feeds' for the upcoming IE7 release. You
can read more about this hotly debated subject at
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/76104/microsoft-defends-rss-rebranding.html
and at http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/009849.html
There is no doubt though that RSS is here to stay. It has
become an integral part of the blogosphere, a method of
aggregating large amounts of content from hundreds of blogs into
one place. From a blogger's point of view RSS is essential to
building and keeping an audience. Wary of clicking on
subscriptions, Internet users finally have a way to grab your
content (updated every day, right?) when they want it. For the
blogger they now have a way to syndicate their articles, sharing
them among other sites who publish those articles. Those who
syndicate get content, and the blogger gets exposure.
Richard Dows is a web designer living in Florida, working on
small businesses, blogs, site design, and more. You can find him
working on his own blog at http://www.thex.com/rd/ or writing
and participating in others like http://www.balancednewsblog.com/
and http://www.thex.com/webstandards/
MORE RESOURCES updated Fri. June / 09 / 2023
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