Have you seen this image?

Look in the URL window of the web browser you’re in right now.  It’s the same window that has the address of this blog.

It’s the logo for RSS, or in long winded words, Really Simple Syndication.

Wikipedia quotes Netscape (it’s ‘Dada’) in describing RSS as “a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.

Web feed? I knew you were going to ask. (That’s because I did too!)

Photo thanks to thinkartificial.org

A web or news feed is a data format for providing users with frequently updated content (Wikipedia again, love these guys!).

So to illustrate this example we need frequently updated content. We can use this blog for that.  How did you get here today?  Did you surf the web, or perhaps you’ve bookmarked the site?  That’s not too hard.

But what if you wanted to read the contents from 5 of your favorite blogs?  Now let’s say you wanted to check the sports scores for football too.  It’s going to take you a long time.

RSS packages up the information you’d like to read and provides it on the web for any web program to come along a grab it.  These programs can then present to you all of the information from a variety of sites all in one place.  It’s like you’re own personal newspaper- made possible by RSS.  Without it, programs would all be sharing information in different ways, and it would look messy by the time it got to you.

Stay tuned and we’ll discuss the best programs to use to gather your favorite RSS feeds.