RSS - Really Simple Syndication Made Simple

Chapter 18

Safko, The Social Media Bible

 RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is key to the way many people use the web today, based on personal observation. And the primary subjects of my observation are my daughter, age 25, and son, age 20.

Fifteen years ago, when I started surfing the World Wide Web regularly, I used several methods that now seem quaint and old-fashioned to find web sites that had information I was seeking: word of mouth or e-mails suggesting sites; links from other sites that I had already found; and occasionally through search engines, although Yahoo and Google were much more primitive then, and most Web sites did not pay attention to search engine optimization. Even today, I tend to rely too heavily on bookmarks to keep track of Web sites I’m interested in. In my browser I maintain an elaborate list of folders that organize bookmarks by subject.

But my kids, and I think they are representative of the vast majority of Web users younger than me, by and large do not repeatedly visit their favorite web sites to see what’s new. I think their bookmark lists are much shorter than mine, and they are much more inclined to use feeds and Google searches.

All of this makes it important for web masters to make sure their sites have an RSS feed. Even when visitors find their sites via a search engine, they might not be likely to return repeatedly to see what’s new.

Safko explains how RSS was developed (as well as Atom, another syndication technology). He explains how syndication makes it possible to notify the whole wide Web (your subscribers, at least) about updates to your site, and also its role in making podcasts possible. Safko also explains the several methods of aggregating and reading feeds, and lists providers.

What I thought was missing from this chapter was an explanation, for do-it-yourselfers like me, of how to add an RSS syndication feed to a web site that you maintain. Many web masters, if they know something about programming, already know this. But some of Safko’s readers do not, and I would have appreciated some basic explanation of how to do this, as well as a list of suggested software.

But in my opinion, an RSS feed and a panel of social bookmarks is rapidly becoming essential to any web site used in marketing goods, services or information to the public.