The secret to using RSS.

Just the facts…

RSS stands for Real Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion which is basi­cally a sub­scrip­tion sys­tem for online con­tent. Think of it as a mag­a­zine or news­pa­per sub­scrip­tion only instead deliv­er­ing a phys­i­cal prod­uct the sys­tem deliv­ers an elec­tronic prod­uct. The sub­scrip­tion fre­quency depends on the prod­uct and the sub­scriber. The process of pro­vid­ing sub­scrip­tion based infor­ma­tion elec­tron­i­cally is called a FEED. The Feed is what you sub­scribe too and instead of hav­ing to visit the site every­time you want to read some­thing, the con­tent is deliv­ered to you. You can do this for any site that offers RSS and what you end up with is col­lec­tion of your favorite con­tent. As a result you can more eas­ily con­sume your favorite con­tent and read it at your leisure.

This syn­di­ca­tion approach can deliver just about any type of con­tent includ­ing, music (think iTunes)  video and audio shows (Pod­casts) can all be sub­scribed to if the source offers the them as a feed.

So…how do I get my stuff?

To start get­ting a feed you just need to find the orange but­ton that usu­ally has “Sub­scribe” writ­ten above,below or beside it. Click that but­ton and usu­ally  you will be taken to a page that shows the most recent con­tent of that site at the top of the page will be drop down menu which allows you to choose the ser­vice you want to use. See below:

Now that you have the stuff how do you read it?

Well there is the easy way and the hard way.…lets go with the easy way first. The eas­i­est is to use an online ser­vice (an aggre­ga­tor because it aggre­gates all of your sub­scrip­tions into one place)  like Blog­lines,google, Yahoo and a host of other ser­vices. I use Blog­lines for no rea­son other than I just like the way it works! The reader then col­lects all of your sub­scrip­tions and all you need to do is click on the site name for exam­ple  “theartistscenter.com” and you see all of the con­tent writ­ten since you sub­scribed. So every time one of your sub­scrip­tions updates their site or blog that new con­tent is deliv­ered to your reader. Here is a screen cap­ture of my Blog­lines sub­scrip­tions you can see the list of sub­scrip­tions to the left and that I have clicked on Seth Godin’s Blog, the con­tent I haven’t read yet shows up on the right.

The best part of using an on-line ser­vice is you can access your con­tent where ever you are as long as you have inter­net access. If you have an inter­net enabled cell phone like the iPhone you can get your con­tent on your phone.

The hard way to see the con­tent is to use soft­ware that resides on your com­puter, how­ever, I think most peo­ple use one of the services.

It will only get better…

RSS has been around since the late ‘90s but has only become pop­u­lar in the last cou­ple of years. Because of it’s con­ve­nience and way of mak­ing your life on the inter­net eas­ier it will be around and con­tinue to be refined well into the future.

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Tagged as: Apple, Bloglines, IPhone, ITunes, RSS, Yahoo