What is it?

Lets start with the abbreviation RSS – Really Simple Syndication. Well, we all quite know what ‘Really’ and ‘Simple’ meant, but what is Syndication? The WordWeb dictionary (my favorite) says:

Syndication – 1) Organizing into or administering as a syndicate. 2) Selling (read Sending) an article for publication to several newspapers or magazines at the same time.

That in all likelihood, made some sense. Did it not? If I publish this post on my blog, would all my RSS feed subscribers receive the article without visiting the blog? Looks like it. Lets explore further.

RSS feed is a standard format of publishing frequently-updated works such as – news articles, blog posts, scraps etc. The content usually circulated via feeds would be excerpts/summaries of new articles, links to new web pages or similar audio/visual media.

Okay! How does it work?

1. Content publishers provide a link or a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier, also called URL) on their websites. For example, the feed URI of my blog looks like this:  http://bharathreddyt.wordpress.com/feed/ and that of a CNN World business page looks like this: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/edition_business.rss

2. A user/subscriber needs an application called a Feed Reader/RSS Reader/Aggregator.
These applications would typically be:

• Web-based: Google Reader/iGoogle, My Yahoo
• Desktop-based:
  • Browsers like Mozilla Firefox, IE;
  • Applications like feedReader, MicrosoftMAX;
  • Email clients like IBM Lotus note, MS Outlook Express etc.
• Mobile-based: Google Mobile RSS reader, feedBurner etc.

3. Subscribers would have to supply a feed URI to the Feed reader. The feed reader would retrieve feed content and display.

So, What big deal?

1. No nonsense: Have you ever subscribed to news letters or updates from sites? Have you faced with problems like spam, viruses, phishing? The story doesn’t end here. When you register for subscriptions, you would have to leave your details of identity and mainly your email ID. This could lead to Identity theft. RSS feeds are a way out. You would not even have to provide your email ID. Its the content publishers that give us the feed link and its your feed reader application that get the feeds to you.

2. Unsubscribe Easily: Say, you’re not interested anymore in receiving updates/news form a certain subscription/source, you’d have to send an ‘unsubscribe’ email. And yet, you’re at the mercy of the sender. In case of an RSS subscription, to unsubscribe, you’d only have to remove the feed’s link from your feed reader. That’s that.

3. Feed reader applications generally have features to sort and group similar feeds. For example, say I subscribe for sports news from three different sites and stock updates from 5 different sites. I would have an option to sort them into two categories, say sports and stocks.

4. What more? Browsers these days have built in feed readers. I’ve seen them on Firefox and IE7. When users click on a feed link on a website, they’re taken to a page that displays the feeds for the site and the user is given an option to choose a feed reader of choice. (See the illustrations section below) The simplest way is to choose to save it as a book mark. A folder is created under bookmarks folder and it has links that the feed intends to circulate.

A Brief History

Started around 1995 by Ramanathan V. Guha, an Indian computer scientist while he was working with Apple. He was one of those who conceived the idea of collecting integrating published data and presenting. He developed RDF (Resource Description Framework) which was then the basis of RSS. After quite some fuss over the ownership of the technology, the copy right is currently owned by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Its maintained by the RSS Advisory Board.

Though the technology of RSS feeds isn’t new – the RSS2.0 version was announced way back in 2002 – the usage became popular only recently. One of the earliest adopters of the RSS feed technology was Mozilla Firefox and it was followed by MS Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Opera and several others.

Illustrations:

When I click on http://bharathreddyt.wordpress.com/feed/, I see a page like this:

After I subscribe to the feed on FireFox, I see a bookmark folder as this:

References:

http://www.whatisrss.com/

http://library.ucsc.edu/science/rss.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79408