How You Can Use RSS

How You Can Use RSS

Content Syndication

Syndication refers to a "publish and subscribe" model for online information where specific content is "published" by one source and "syndicated" to be viewed or reused at other subscribing sites. RSS syndication is becoming very popular with both dedicated Internet publishers such as Yahoo and CNET and traditional offline publishers New York Times and Wired magazine.

Publishers gain an advantage by using RSS to distribute news in an ongoing manner during the day. With the availability of 24x7 news channels, readers both online and off will go wherever the best information is available. Syndication RSS "feeds" are dynamic, so when the publisher changes the content, its subscribers are automatically informed of the updates. Webmasters using RSS are reporting increased traffic to their sites as RSS subscribers click through to the original article. "The benefit to us is we're distributing our headlines and the users come back to the site," said Catherine Levene, vice president for business development at New York Times Digital, which has been offering RSS feeds for more than two years.

Content Aggregation

For publishers, RSS is a way to distribute information. For readers, RSS is a tool for getting content where, when and how they want it. The sources that publish RSS often allow you to subscribe to the latest updates from a particular section of their news, say just Sports, Financial News, or Arts. Each news "feed" has a unique URL, usually identified by an orange XML icon or a link that says "syndicate this site. Hundreds of thousands of Web feeds are now available. Syndic8.com, which tracks syndicated news feeds, reported that 34,498 new feeds were created during just the one month of March 2004.

The most compelling use of RSS is that it lets users follow and stay current on dozens of websites by simply reviewing the feeds collected by their news aggregators. The sites can be scanned in seconds rather than having to be laboriously loaded individually to see whether any content has been updated. "If you're not reading it in RSS you're wasting your time," declaimed Microsoft's blogging evangelist, Robert Scoble, who says he subscribes to nearly 1,300 feeds.

Improvement over Email Blasts and Newsletters

RSS a way for organizations to replace other subscription models, such as email newsletters, and distribute information to interested parties both inside and outside the firewall. In the future, RSS may handle marketing tasks where e-mail now falls flat, says Jeanne Jennings, an e-mail marketing consultant in Washington, DC. As with e-mail, visitors can sign up for marketing alerts (for instance, useful product news plus discount coupons). Unlike e-mail, visitors can rest assured that they can't be spammed. If you don't like what you're getting via RSS, just pull the plug.

Chris Pirillo, who runs Lockergnome's RSS Resource, says bluntly, "Email is dead." Death, in his estimation, has resulted from email becoming so pervasive that?between emails from legitimate sources, bcc/Reply-All overload, automatic notifications, and the glut of spam?it has ceased to be a reasonable delivery medium. "When you have to tell people that you're not a spammer, that's a problem," Pirillo says. As a result, he has made all his Lockergnome newsletters available as both email and RSS subscriptions and encourages subscribers to move away from the email distribution channel.

Using RSS, you can update those who need to know in a much less intrusive way than email. UserLand's Jake Savin has pointed out that with RSS, only people who need to see a piece of information (those subscribed to a given feed) have to view it. "You don't have to send a company-wide email that people aren't going to read anyway," Savin says.

Research and Education

Although RSS is only just beginning to make headway into the mainstream enterprise computing environment, it has great potential to help knowledge workers gather information more efficiently. What makes the news aggregator so useful is that it collects information effortlessly from the sites you previously needed to visit. RSS users quickly find that they are regularly receiving important information that they would not have known to look for. Says Alan Levine, "since I started monitoring RSS feeds from about 80 instructional technology weblogs in January 2003, I can without a doubt say I have learned of more innovations and information relevant to my field than I would have gotten from checking web sites and reading listservs".

Karen Schneider is the library director for the state of California's library Web portal, Librarian's Index to the Internet. As a librarian, she's found RSS to be an invaluable research tool. She says she quickly realized how valuable RSS could be for rapid dissemination of information while at the same time, it reduces email. "This is the year that everyone has become fed up with email and more and more content has become available in RSS feeds," she says. In a short time, she joined the chorus of librarians singing the praises of RSS, even posting an RSS tutorial on her blog, The Free Range Librarian.

Updates and Alerts

Here is a short list of companies and organizations using RSS to communicate frequently updated information to their customers and end-users:

• Microsoft security bulletin RSS feed
• eBay auctions FreeBiddingTools.com
• Apple's iTunes generates a feed to alert subscribers to its latest sounds.
• Washington Post RSS news feeds.
• RSS Weather.com
• The U.S. Geological Survey earthquakes RSS feeds
• The U.S. Product Safety Commission provides recall notices via RSS.
• Human Rights Watch RSS feeds

Big Media Objects

A demo publishing system launched in March 2004 by Andrew Grumet and Dave Winer merged two of today's hottest technologies -- RSS news syndication and BitTorrent file sharing -- to create a cheap publishing system for "big media objects." The hybrid system is meant to eliminate both the publisher's need for fat bandwidth, and the consumer's need to wait through a grueling download.

"The idea is that the files you subscribe to download overnight, so you get on your computer in the morning, and they're already there," said Grumet. "I could wake up in the morning and find the latest recordings from my favorite band loaded into my portable MP3 player, and just pick it up and go."

Conclusion

Above are listed only a few of the ways that organizations and their employees can leverage the power of RSS. As companies see RSS in action, they recognize the power of its simplicity, and quickly realize how it can help organizations understand their markets better, watch trends, and stay on top of the mountains of information that are available. What's more, it can help improve communication outside the company with customers, suppliers, journalists, and others interested in what you are doing. As a bonus, it provides a communication outlet that takes some of the pressure off of email, which has become so crowded it's difficult to get your message heard through all the noise.