What is RSS?

RSS is an acronym which stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a file which is published automatically almost in real time most often by blogging software such as Typepad. This file is known as a "feed" and it can be used by other web sites in a variety of ways.

Because of the vast amount of information on the web, and the fact that updating that information is something that happens almost in real time, slower but more comprehensive link-gathering alternatives like search engines and bookmarks are often updated much too long after new information is no longer new. While it is possible to bookmark a site or a particular page, it is still necessary for the reader to follow that bookmark and actively look for new information, even if none has actually been published recently.

Search engines are a more complete approach to this, as for a search engine, everything is a bookmark. The problem with trying to update the entire web in real time is, well, the web is a very big place.

So there became a need for a better way. What sites, and especially blogs, needed was a way to publish new information as it became available: a way to send an update to a reader without actually sending all of the data. The concept was not new. During the dot-com period, many web "portals" experimented with the idea of "push" technology, which was sort of a broadcasting system where sites could send data to readers without the readers actually requesting the information actively.

But all that was really necessary were the bookmarks. What RSS does so well is it doesn't send the data, or the page, or the news article: it just sends the link, often in the form of a headline. Once a reader has "subscribed" to an RSS feed, it becomes a small, customized list of bookmarks specific to the subscribed site. The important feature is that a published RSS feed is updated automatically by the site in near-real-time. Every time a new article is published, the RSS feed automatically lists that article in the bookmark list. Every reader subscribed to that feed then, in turn, displays the new article at the top of the list.

This offers the best of all the alternatives. Readers can choose whether to subscribe, meaning they don't have to get any particular list of articles: they can select only the ones they want. RSS feeds are very light, meaning they have very little data overall, which increases speed and limits the burden on the network. Also, since RSS feeds are a fairly simple text format, they can be displayed or processed in a variety of ways to make the information they contain that much more useful.

Technologies like RSS are available in almost all current web browsers and operating systems, and there are hundreds of web sites that offer ways to customize and organize RSS feeds efficiently and quickly. RSS is one of the many reasons blogs have become a very popular way to communicate on the web.