Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Do You Understand What RSS Is?

Do You Understand What RSS Is?

RSS can have more than one meaning behind it. Usually, RSS stands for "really simple syndication" but it can also mean "rich site summary" or "RDF site summary".

RDF stands for resource description framework. That answers the question of what is RSS, but not what it can do.

What is RSS in the context of really simple syndication? It is a tool that allows sites to give a quick summary of important links and descriptions in XML format. Basically this will permit you to syndicate content by allowing other blog owners and webmasters that have a specific topic summary, to use it as part of their list.

Blogmasters and webmasters collect these various summaries with something called a feed aggregator or a feed reader. By using this tool they are essentially asking, "where is RSS" instead of "what is RSS" and then the feed reader works to find it.

An aggregator finds RSS feeds to aggregate from selected large sites, such as Yahoo and MSN, and selected smaller sites, such as hand-picked personal blogs and news sites.

The blogmasters and webmasters then take the script generated from the aggregator and insert it into their blogs. The RSS feed is then created in this way and will automatically start pulling news items and blog posts each time they come up. In addition, each time the site page or blog is refreshed, all the latest information collected will be displayed.

This is good for two reasons. By using your own RSS feed, you will be able to have your content distributed across the internet without having to pay each time you submit a press release, or contact other blog owners and webmasters.

If you have your own personal blog page, then by using an RSS feed you can add fresh content to it much easier and faster. You will be able to put new content links and summaries anytime you want but without taking a lot of time to search out related information. You just need to choose a feed aggregator to select the potential feeds you can use and these can be found on a list of news sites and authority blogs. Additionally, you will be able to input your own selections, allowing you to create custom feeds.

So what is RSS? RSS is a simple way in which to drive traffic to your blog and to display summaries of other blogs.

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