What is RSS?
5-24-06 Edited bcash5-24-06 Originally clipped from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
RSS is a family of web feed formats. A web feed is a document (often XML-based) which contains content items, often summaries of stories or weblog posts with web links to longer versions. Weblogs and news websites are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to "top ten" lists of hit tunes.
RSS is used by (among other things) news websites, weblogs and podcasting. The abbreviation usually refers to the term "Really Simple Syndication".
Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS, in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator.
UsageWeb feeds are widely used by the growing weblog community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text, and even attach multimedia files (as in podcasting). RSS has rapidly spread to many of the major news organizations, including Reuters, CNN, PR Newswire, Business Wire, and the BBC. These providers allow other websites to incorporate their "syndicated" headline or headline-and-short-summary feeds under various usage agreements. RSS is now used for many purposes, including marketing, bug-reports, or any other activity involving periodic updates or publications. Many corporations are turning to RSS for delivery of their news, replacing email and fax distribution.
As the mainstream media attempts to realize the full potential of RSS, the news media is utilizing RSS by bypassing traditional news sources. Consumers and journalists are now able to have news constantly fed to them using subscriptions instead of searching or browsing for it.
A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is common to find web feeds on major websites and many smaller ones.
RSS-aware programs are available for various operating systems.
Client-side readers and aggregators are typically constructed
as standalone programs or extensions to existing programs such
as web browsers. Apple's browser for the Macintosh, Safari, as
well as the cross-platform Mozilla Firefox and Opera browsers
have integrated support for RSS feeds. Email programs are
increasingly reading RSS feeds and aggregating that content
into special folders. Thunderbird, Eudora, and the
upcoming Outlook 10 all support syndication.
Web-based feed readers and news aggregators require no software installation and make the user's "feeds" available on any computer with Web access. Some aggregators combine existing web feeds into new feeds, e.g., taking all football related items from several sports feeds and providing a new football feed. There are also search engines for content published via web feeds like Feedster or Blogdigger.
On Web pages, web feeds (RSS or Atom) are typically linked with
the word "Subscribe", an orange rectangle, 
, or
with the letters 
or 
. Many news
aggregators such as My Yahoo! publish subscription buttons ( 
) for use on Web pages to
simplify the process of adding news feeds.
