According to Wikipedia:
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works-such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video-in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed,” “web feed,” or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored Web sites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.
As one of our clients put it, “you lost me at ‘web feed formats’ can you start over?”.
If you have a blog, this is all fairly important and if you use our services here at Widget, you’ll end up calling us to ask “where is my RSS feed” at some point, so pay attention!
Think newspapers. Syndication is quite simply broadcasting (an article or cartoon) for publication in many magazines or newspapers at the same time. Ironically, now this term is more often used regarding the content of websites than it is for newspapers.
Really simple syndication comes set up and ready to go on most blogs. On Blogger, for instance if you type in http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml the “feed” will usually automatically come up. That is, if you haven’t changed settings, but we’re assuming here you’re a beginner and you don’t go regularly mucking around in your publishing settings in the back end.
So, why is this important? Because this is how most of the web world “views” your feed. It puts your blog in a standardized format so about any service can read it and post it wherever they want.
Most social networking profiles (like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Hootsuite) allow you to put your “feed” up on a page or in a profile area. So, then your friends and/or clients on that network can read your blog - right there and constantly get updated posts.
More importantly you, as a writer, don’t have to republish your information over and over in different places.
This feed is also monitored by services like Google Reader or Bloglines. In these programs, you can plug in your favorite RSS feeds and they will let you know when something new comes up on these blogs. Embarrassingly, I monitor 329 blogs - but only roughly a third of them have new posts daily. Thus, the service saves me a lot of time going to a blog only to find there’s nothing new there.
This is also how Yahoo and Google put “top headlines” on their pages—they crawl through RSS feeds and find the most popular of the newsfeeds to give you constantly updated “popular” stories. This is also why sometimes it’s about a top actor in the movie Avatar even though we all feel Haiti deserves more popular attention.
The site—feedburner.com—is a great one because now that Google has bought it, it interacts with Google Analytics and Google AdWords to help you maximize your blog performance, but maybe that’s a subject for another article?
Originally published on FrequentlyWrongbutNeverinDoubt
