There’s another “next big thing” coming in the world of the World Wide Web, and it’s called RSS. RSS has actually been around for quite awhile, but it’s just now gaining more widespread popularity and usage.

RSS is an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication”. Although the implementation is pretty geekily complicated, here’s the common-everyday-user description.

Web pages are comprised of two parts: presentation and content. Presentation is the appearance of the page (graphics, colors, sound, navigation buttons, etc.) Content is the information you get from the page. You’ve probably visited many web pages where you have to endure a whole lot of presentation in return for very little content. Anyway, wouldn’t it be great if you could glean the information you’re looking for from a given web site without having to wade through the advertising, pop-up windows, etc? With RSS, you can.

Many news-oriented web sites now offer what’s called an “RSS feed”. This RSS feed is really a text file, in a format similar to the HTML format that web browsers read. This text file contains an index, or table of contents, of the information (for example, news articles) available on the site. This index contains data about the publisher, the URL addresses for each article, categories, time/date stamps, etc. The file is kept updated by the site author as new content becomes available. Like HTML code, the text in RSS files is pretty much gobblety-goop to the casual user when viewed by itself.

However, when viewed through any number of available programs called RSS newsreaders or “aggregators”, the user is presented with information that can be filtered and organized to make better use of the time they spend looking for information on the internet.

With an RSS aggregator, you can read all of the articles of interest to you in twenty newspapers in 15 to 30 minutes. This same task would take a couple of hours using a web browser and a Google-type search, as you would have to sift through the “presentation” on each web page (i.e. waiting for graphics to load in, etc.)

So how do you find these “feeds”, and use them? Do a Google search for “RSS Feeds” and you’ll find many sites dedicated to sharing feeds. On most RSS-enabled web sites, you’ll find small, orange icon images that say “XML” or “ATOM”. These images are actually links to files containing the RSS information for that site, which are in the form of standard web URLs. You copy that URL into an RSS aggregator program’s “Subscriptions” window, and you’ve become a subscriber to that RSS feed. You can then have your aggregator check that feed for new information at regular intervals, or do it yourself anytime. Many aggregators support “dragging and dropping” these icons/URLS directly into the application.

The aggregator then displays, for each site subscription, a text list of the contents of the site, a short description of each page, and a link to go to that page. Some aggregators have built-in simple web browsers that display the actual page, or you can have your favorite browser display the page instead.

Weblogs, or “blogs” made RSS syndication popular, but RSS is being adopted by thousands of news organizations and companies of all kinds. Apple uses RSS to keep music-lovers apprised of new music at the iTunes Music Store, as well as Hot News, Latest Downloads, Support Information, etc. The next version of Apple’s Safari web browser will have RSS aggregation built into the browser. You can also find plug-ins for web browsers that provide aggregation capabilities as well. Happy RSS-ing!

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski