I have started to learn a lot about blogging and most importantly is this new concept, at least to me, is RSS Feeds. I consider myself internet savvy but until I made the commitment to blogging, RSS was just something I never really utilized and understood but always noticed on other websites. RSS provides a really simple and easy way to keep updated on all your favorite blogs, I guess that is why RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but until I actually used RSS I considered it some nerdy hard to grasp idea.

Why You Need RSS

This is really a two part answer because there are two types of internet users that need RSS. First the publisher of a blog needs an RSS feed to help distribute his articles to people who are interested in his blog and secondly the blog subscribers needs an RSS feed to keep updated on his or her favorite publishers articles.

From the readers point of view it can become daunting to try and keep updated on all the latest posts and news written from a specific blog. Imagine you have 20 websites that you really enjoy reading articles from and every day you go and visit each site independently hoping to read some new and interesting story. Well with RSS you can subscribe to the blog or website articles through RSS and from within an RSS reader, or aggregator, you can see when a publisher posts a new article.

Essentially what happens is you can keep up to date with all 20 websites without having to visit each and every one hoping for something new to read, you will see what sites published new articles and you can read them from within the RSS reader and then visit the site to comment, bookmark and share with others.

Publishers Point Of View

If you are a publisher you want the ability to let everyone know you just posted a blog entry. This is where RSS comes in really nicely. You want to integrate a RSS feed manager onto your site. If you are on wordpress like myself, RSS is already a built in feature but the problem that I have found is that it’s not very dynamic. The most dominating RSS feed manager in the industry is FeedBurner and of course it is now owned by the infamous Google corporation. What I like about feedburner is they give you many options for look and design, they provide stats on your subscribers, how many subscribers, your reach and I now see you can monetize your feed by allowing Google to display adsense within your feed. If you are on wordpress like myself you can download the FeedBurner plugin for wordpress, install and configure.

So why don’t your subscribers just sign up via email? Well it seems there is a lot of spam going around these days and people are just so hesitant to give out email. Through RSS, no email information is required. Nobody’s privacy will be intruded upon and they don’t have to worry about you trashing another email address because they wanted to know when a new article is published.

Readers Point Of View

If you like to read blogs and news articles but want to eliminate the daily visits to the publishers website you can use a reader or aggregator to stay current on all postings for that site. RSS really does simplify the process of keeping up to date on all your favorite blogs and if you are a blogger or new to blogging I think this is a must have. I have decided to go with the Google reader platform. I am already fully integrated with google myself so this makes it really easy to keep everything I use all in one place. I utilize Googles, ipage, Gmail, Docs, Adwords, Adsense, Calender, Maps and a lot of other services from Google so using Google reader is an obvious choice and if you are familiar with Gmail, the delivery of RSS articles is practically identical.

RSS Resources

I was looking around for more information about RSS and I came up with a few sites that really helped in understanding how they work . For a really good technical point of view and history of RSS I would recommend Wikipedias artcile on RSS Feeds. It’s really in depth and lets you know a lot of nonsense but if you are really interested on how it was developed and how it has advanced over the years, they break it down very nicely.

I also read a really great article from Mashable about RSS. They go into great detail on all the services and software available for RSS. The article is called The Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS Resources. Be sure to check it out if are looking for RSS software solutions whether t be on the publisher or reader side.

If RSS has still left you dumbfounded I found a really great article that attempts to put RSS in the most simplest of terms. The article is called How To Explain RSS The Oprah Way. The explanantion is similar to this article but I hope I slimmed it down even more for you and cleared it up just as well.

Lastly I hope to add an update to RSS in the near future, more on the topic of how to optimize your RSS Feed and how to better monetize. As for now, I think its key to learn how to implement RSS, use RSS and educate others on RSS.

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