Over the years technology has provided us with more options forsending and receiving content over the internet. One of the newest isa delivery system called Real Simple Syndication or "RSS".
Definition:
RSS is a format for delivering news and other content through asyndication channel. The most common sites that publish RSS feedsstill include major news organizations whose information is brokeninto different stories and can be delivered to recipients oncepublished.
This delivery concept has also been adopted by other non-news relatedsites such as the blogging community who publish posts (similar tonews stories) and allow other people to subscribe through RSS toreceive their blog posts automatically.
RSS Usage Rates:
RSS has been in use since 1999 but still hasnt been adopted by themass Internet community. According to an October 2005 White Paperpublished by Yahoo, "Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internetusers. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly usedRSS." [http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss/RSS_whitePaper1004.pdf]
A publisher looking to distribute their content cant rely on just RSSalone.
Tools to Read RSS:
To read an RSS feed you need news aggregator software to capture, readand store all the content that is delivered through RSS. There aremany popular aggregators on the market today, many of which are freeof charge.
Two popular types of aggregators are web based readers (Bloglines) ora desktop reader (SharpReader). The web based reader is an onlinefree service that you login and can subscribe, read and manage allyour RSS feeds. The desktop software is similar in features to itsonline counterpart but is installed and runs on your computer.
Will RSS Replace Email?
Id be willing to wager that anyone reading this article today checkedtheir email, in fact going a bit further I bet you not only checkedyour email but also replied to some of it as well. Will RSS replaceemail? - I think we can collectively say -- no, email is far tooimportant but the beauty of email is that you can marry the twotechnologies together to deliver information that subscribers want, inthe format they want...
About the Author
Sean Cohen, Director of Client Relations and Development of Newtown,PA based AWeber Communications, Inc. an opt-in email service provider.Visit AWeber and see how you can incorporate RSS and emailautomatically with our newest feature -- Feed Broadcaster.