Is RSS Here to Stay or Gone Tomorrow?

RSS is totally hot. We have seen it everywhere, from John-Doe blogsites to major news websites. If you haven't heard of RSS before, that's okay, because I hadn't either until a couple of months ago!

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or whatever you want it to stand for. (I have seen it also stand for RDF Site Summary, but it really doesn't matter.) What's important is what it does.

Here's how RSS works:

Every site that has constantly changing content has one big problem: How do you notify your visitors when you've posted new content without them having to scour your entire site every 30 mins? You could send them an email, but that has several drawbacks.

First, you might not get your messages through the spam filters. Filters are snatching more and more messages, and just to keep up anymore you have to run all your content through rating systems just to find the likelyhood of it getting blocked. What a pain in the neck!

Second, people are so hesitant to give out their closely guarded email address. I know I guard my email address with my life. How can your visitors trust you if they just clicked to your site? You could be an underground spam operation for all they care.

This is where RSS is awesome!

Instead of sending an email, you can have your website generate what's called an RSS Feed. An RSS Feed is nothing more than a webpage with a bunch of summaries of the new content on it. Next time you see that little orange icon with XML or RSS, click on it and you'll see what I mean. The summaries are formatted in such a way that an RSS Reader can sort them out and display them neatly.

There are tons of free RSS Readers now, so if you don't have one, do a simple Google search for RSS Reader and you should have no trouble finding one.

All the visitor has to do is copy the little orange RSS icon link and paste it into their RSS Reader program. The RSS program will periodically download the RSS webpage and will display the new headlines much like your email program will display your subject lines. If you like one of the headlines, you can click on it and it will display a short description and a link to the entire article. If you want to read more, click the link and it will display the actual full article on the website.

Here's why this is killer:

You can now be notified of the new content or headlines posted to all your favorite websites without having to do very much work! Imagine putting twenty RSS Feeds into your reader and having it download all the content in a matter of seconds instead of having to surf to each site individually!

If you ask me, RSS is here to stay. All the major sites support it like CNN, ESPN, Yahoo and Google, so that surely is a good sign! So go on and fire up Google and get yourself an RSS Reader. You will be glad you did...I sure was!

Feel free to reprint this article so long as you include the resource box listed with the article.

Kent Thompson is the creator of FeedMagic, a full-featured sequential autoresponder program that allows your subscribers to choose between Email or a personalized RSS Feed for delivery. To find out how you can use the power of RSS for your website, click here: http://FeedMagic.com

More Resources

Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting

More Blogging/RSS Information:

Related Articles

Sales Marketing: Secrets To Using Blogs (Online Diaries) To Increase Your sales And Profits
These days, everybody is blogging.How about you?You can incorporate blogging into your sales marketingand achieve more success.
RSS Meets the Needs of Direct Marketers
Contrary to general opinion, RSS meets the needs of even the most demanding direct marketer, actually providing most of what e-mail marketing does, except for the strong push factor.Most direct marketing reasons against RSS are in fact the result of inadequate understanding of RSS by most marketers.
Who needs T.V. News, Newspapers and Radio News?
T.V.
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.
You Are Losing Money If Youre Not Using RSS Feeds On Your Website!
(An RSS primer can be found near the bottom of the article)A commercial website in 2005 is really costing itself money if it does not utilize the myriad advantages of implementing RSS feeds. RSS provides near real-time delivery of information your website visitors are interested in, it provides constantly updated content that search engines crave, and it is quite simple to implement.
3 Overlooked Ways to Get Hundreds of Links and Prospects to Your Blog
Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds? No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic.
5 Reasons Why Your Site Needs to Publish a News Feed
It seems like everyone is talking about RSS Feeds. They've been around for years but the buzz is up about them as the technology continues to go mainstream.
Feed The Need: 5 Ways To Use RSS To Boost Your Business Or Organizational Success
RSS (it stands for Really Simple Syndication, among other things) is a relatively new technology that allows anyone who creates frequently changing web content - news, blogs, current events, etc. - to deliver their messages to interested readers with no fuss, no muss and best of all - no spam! Currently, RSS is being used by content-rich sites (mainly blogs and news centers) to keep readers up-to-date on newly published posts or breaking stories.
Tips for a Better RSS Feed
Like anything else, a little work can pay dividends. Well-written RSS feeds are more useful to readers and result in more website traffic for the publisher.
Article Marketing For Bloggers - 4 Tips To Build Traffic For Your Blog
Bloggers blog. That's what they do.
Improving Your Customer Relationship Management by Blogging
Before I address the following questions:* What is a blog? and* What can a blog do for my business?let me pose a few "What if . .
RSS more effective than email
Long have I been proclaiming the effectiveness of RSS as a communications channel for non personal communications over that of email. The protection and anonymity that RSS can offer over email means that it is fast becoming the preferred medium for many users.
Blogging: A Profit Making Internet Option
Blogging is a relatively new form of communication, closely related to the newsletters of days long past. Your thoughts, ideas, and activities are posted for the world (or a chosen few) to view, and if you choose to include the option, leave a comment.
What the Heck is a Blog?
Everybody is talking about blogs. They are everywhere: on the TV, in the newspapers, and all over the internet.
Seven Sizzling Ways to Turn Targeted Traffic Towards Your Blog!
Blogs are an unbelievable way to achieve success on the internet. Blogs can establish a web presence, express your opinions and generate serious profits.
Simple Syndication (RSS) -- Wheres The Payoff?
How RSS really does pay off..
Blogging Is Not Important - Its Crucial
It has been established that having a 'blog' helps your web site gain visitors and higher rankings in search engines. But a small study which I have just completed shows that blogging is much more important than this.
Learn how to Create a RSS Feed
Creating an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is really quite a simple process. RSS is a lightweight XML design that is really easy to setup and implement.
Using Feedburner to Add Statistics to Your RSS Feed
Out of many of the free RSS and blogging services that I have tried one of the most useful has been Feedburner. Feedburner allows you to publish your RSS feed and provides circulation statistics about your RSS feed.
How To Republish RSS Feeds On Your Website
In this article I am going to cover some tools that you can use that will allow you to publish RSS feeds on your site. This will allow you to have fresh, updated content on your site and you have control of what sort of content you display and how often it is updated.