RSS:

RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication”. In an earlier technical version it stood for “Rich Site Summary”.

RSS is a technology to make the easy syndication of fresh content via RSS feeds possible. In most cases the content consists of articles , blog posts or news text but newer forms of RSS even make the syndication of podcasts and videos  possible.

RSS is used to alert users of the new content - like the news, articles, article snippets, blog posts etc. - and make it available for automatic download to any user who subscribes to the RSS feed. Subscription to a feed is easily done by clicking on an RSS button and anytime there is new content the subscriber is automatically notified.

To be able to read the content on his computer the user needs an RSS aggregator or RSS reader-software.

The big advantage for a webmaster who syndicates his content via RSS is, that users do not have to visit his site to find out about fresh content but are informed automatically through the RSS feed.

A RSS feed is a XML document (Extensible Markup Language) which consists of data about the content to be syndicated, the title, a more or less brief description or summary of the text and a link to the full text on the site from which the content is syndicated.

An Internet marketer interested in making the content on his website available and known to as many users as possible – especially when there are news about new products or other new marketing messages – can put a RSS button on his site. A visitor may subscribe to this RSS feed by just clicking on the button. Every time there is fresh content the feed is automatically downloaded to every subscriber’s computer and provides him with title, summary and a link to the full article.

Example for a standard use of RSS on socratesblog.com , the blog of Internet marketer Socrates Socratous. There are 2 buttons at the end of each blog entry. The ”Bookmark” button is for easy bookmarking of the blog URL to one or several social bookmarking sites. Clicking the “Subscribe” button takes the user to the page displayed below.

On this page the user has the opportunity to subscribe to the RSS Feed of the blog by selecting one of the offered feed readers (either web-based or Desktop). In this example the indicated button “Add to Google” was selected. The feed is then included on the personalized Google start page as you can see below.

The RSS feed displays the headlines of the recent entries and is updated every time a new posting to the blog occurs. Clicking on a + sign next to a headline opens the full blog post on the Google page. Clicking on a headline takes the user to the blog page itself.

Another use of RSS for an Internet marketer would be to include an RSS feed from another site in the source code of his website and thereby automatically updating the page content. The feed would have to come from a source which would make it’s content available via RSS. This way he would be able to present his visitors fresh content every time without having to do anything for it himself.

[ Syndication is of Latin and Greek origin, syn- meaning together and dicere = to show, to tell]

 

Bookmark this page

BlinkListDeliciousDiggFacebookFurlRedditSpurlStumbleuponYahoo My WebGoogle Bookmarks