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I was working with colleagues recently, discussing technology, and I casually tossed around the term RSS feed. I was presented with the question, “What’s an RSS feed?” I quickly tried to answer the question, but there is certainly much more to understanding RSS than I was able to quickly explain. So here is a little more on RSS.

Very simply the term RSS means Really Simple Syndication. Many people are familiar with the term syndication, especially in reference to television and radio shows or newspaper columns. The same concept applies with technology. Just as traditional radio and television shows or newspaper columns are distributed to a wider audience when syndicated, so is technology like web news casts, blog posts, or podcasts. The benefit of using RSS feeds is the compilation of various sources, or feeds, in one place. Many web browsers have feed readers included and there are a number of dedicated programs that act feed readers or aggregators. Instead of browsing to a number of different web sites to hunt down your content it is ‘fed’ to you. Anytime an update is made the newest content is automatically sent to your feed reader.

Users subscribe to feeds by clicking the feed icon on a website or blog. I’m sure many people have seen this icon but just didn’t know what to do with it. It’s often the small orange square with the white dot in the bottom left corner and two arcs beaming from the dot. Once the you subscribe only the content you want is sent to you.

At this point I have to refer to a great resource created by Will Richardson- anything more here would be rundunant when he has already created a great guide, “The How’s and Why’s of RSS Feeds”

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Check out this video on RSS in Plain English