What Are RSS Feeds? Again.
Posted by Adriana Cronin-Lukas
Monday, August 9, 2004 @ 10:29 AM
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Syndication
A basic explanation of RSS:
RSS also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.
RSS feeds are composed in XML, which is a very simple markup language. Similar to HTML, XML uses tags to identify fields.
The beauty of RSS is that readers can quickly scan headlines (titles) and read articles of interest. Because the information is condensed and provided in a single location users can generally review more information in a shorter time frame. Additional information is only a click away. Best of all readers choose the feeds they wish to see, there is no spam with RSS. If you are not completely thrilled with the content appearing in a feed simply remove it from the newsreader. The technology is a pull technology rather than push technology, meaning the content is not forced on the consumers, who pull the content they want to see.
Yes, the last sentence is the main reason why I link to the article here. Pull, not push.
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