RSS is not exactly new but is fairly recent and taking off in a big way. Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary, depends where you read the explanation! )is a way that a website can show, for example, headlines from articles. A website creates what is called a ‘feed’ which special programs or websites can read and then display the article titles. The clever bit comes where the RSS feeds from different sites can appear in the same list or category.

Microsoft is now adding RSS feed capabilities in to the soon to be released version 7 of Internet explorer. In the mean time Mozilla Firefox (www.mozilla.org/) and Opera (www.opera.com) both have it built in.

For instance:

There are many websites that provide daily sports news. Each site provides its own RSS feed with the titles of each news item. Each site has a category for example football. The RSS news reader (or aggregator) collects the titles of each feed and places them in the relevant categories. So in the category of football, you may have headlines from many different web sites.

You may be wondering what the overall benefit is? Well, instead of visiting many different web sites, you can see all the different titles from many different web sites in one list, effectively delivered to you! Saves time and you will find a lot more things of personal interest to read. It can also help when looking for an article on a site that has a lot of content, saving you both time and effort of searching for the information that is of interest to you.

There are three main ways to view RSS feeds, one is via a browser (FireFox has this built in, look for the special symbol bottom right on the status bar that is shown when a website has RSS available), via a website such as BlogLines (http://www.bloglines.com) or a special program such as FeedReader (available FREE from http://www.feedreader.com/)

Let us now take an example of an RSS feed, the Observer newspaper (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/) has a feed that shows up on FireFox. The special orange button appears bottom right on the status bar.

When you click the button it will display the names of the available feeds (in the Observers case it says ‘Subscribe to RSS’)

Select the feed and FireFox will then allow you to ‘add a bookmark’. This is a special kind of bookmark as the contents will change as the RSS feed changes.

When you later select the Observer book mark, it will show the available articles which you can then choose to open in the main window. You can also select to open all the articles in separate tabs. The bookmark contents will change as the RSS feed changes when new articles are added.

Opera users can click on the RSS symbol, indicated by RSS or XML on a button next to a title. For instance clicking on the red RSS symbols on the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk) will bring up a list of articles to read (may need to click refresh on Opera if a page of text with strange characters appear).

Take a look at http://w.moreover.com/categories/category_list_rss.html for a large list of feeds from thousands different sources.

For background information, history and a more detailed description in RSS, take a look at the most excellent Wikipedia encyclopaedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)