Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a format for sharing headlines and other web content, allowing your audience to browse your headlines and announcements with a "news reader" or "news aggregator" program. A kind of hybrid between web browser and e-mail client, a news reader allows users to subscribe to feeds from their favorite sites, automatically fetching the latest headlines for easy browsing. For the complete content, your subscribers click through to your website.

For your subscribers, RSS feeds offer a time-saving and convenient way to defeat information overload and keep up with a wide range of content. By subscribing to news feeds that specifically meet their interests, users essentially create their own custom-built newspaper or magazine. Scanning even hundreds of articles per day from across the web suddenly becomes an easy task.

RSS has been around since 1999, but it has only recently matured into a popular format, thanks in large part to the corresponding popularity of the online journals known as blogs (most blogging software generates RSS feeds to distribute blog entries). This newfound popularity has spurred non-blog sites to offer their own RSS feeds. The New York Times and the BBC offer news feeds. Amazon.com offers feeds that feature its products. Microsoft uses RSS feeds to communicate with its developer community. Dilbert and Doonesbury cartoons are available via RSS.

In other words, "news feeds" are not just for news sites. Although RSS is certainly well suited for the syndication of news headlines and links, non-news sites can put RSS feeds to work in a variety of other ways.

From marketing new products to distributing press releases to announcing event dates and times, RSS feeds provide a simple way to alert your audience to new content on your website. In fact, as RSS becomes increasingly popular, it promises to become a viable alternative to the troubled e-mail newsletter. RSS sidesteps the headaches of spam-filtering software and list management that beset even the most virtuous of opt-in mailing lists. RSS is always opt-in, it's easy for users to subscribe and unsubscribe, and it's impossible to use it to send unsolicited content. For publishers, that means no blacklists, spam complaints, or subscription hassles of e-mail marketing.

Getting started with RSS

If you're new to RSS and want to try it out, your first step is to get a reader. Here are links to just a few:

• NetNewsWire (Mac)
• NewzCrawler (Mac/Win/Linux)
• BlogExpress (Windows 98+)
• AmphetaDesk (Windows, Mac)
• NewsGator (Windows)

In addition, the Lockergnome website maintains a useful list of RSS resources.

To subscribe to news feeds, you give your news reader the URLs of each RSS feed. The reader checks all of these feeds at a regular interval to see if new content has been added. If so, the readers update and display the latest content for you.

Need more help?

For further assistance and documentation, visit the website of Global Moxie, the developer behind Big Medium.