Greg Broiles, an attorney from San Jose, CA, provided this excellent description of what RSS is and what you can do with it. This was a reply he did today on the SoloMarketing email list. Thanks Greg for the permission to use your comments.
RSS is a method that websites and other online publishers use to make it easy for people to watch their sites for new or changed items.
Let’s say that you have a blog about your area of practice. Every few days, you write a fascinating new entry about something marvelous.
The problem for readers of your blog is that (a) if you update erratically, it’s not very rewarding for them to reload your page every day, and (b) if they figure that out and only look at your page once every month or so, they don’t get to see your pearls of wisdom as quickly as you can deliver them. Also, once you drop into the once-a-month rotation, it’s easy to forget about your site entirely.
So, RSS comes to the rescue – RSS lets your blog software boil down entries into small summaries that ideally let readers decide if they want to read the rest of the entry. Then, readers of your site use an RSS aggregator, which can be web-based or software that they install, to check your RSS feed periodically to see if there are new summaries. If there are new summaries, then the RSS aggregator will show them to the user, which lets the user preview them and decide if they want to read the entire entry or not. RSS aggregators are called aggregators because typically they maintain a list of different websites the user is interested in – so if there are 10 different sites that you follow, the aggregator will check all 10 every day, and show you only entries for the 3 sites that have updated.
If you want to experiment with this as a reader, take a look at www.bloglines.com – it is a web-based aggregator that does a really nice job. Mozilla’s Thunderbird e-mail client will also act as an RSS aggregator, and there are a number of others that I don’t know about, since I like Bloglines.
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Greg Broiles, JD, EA
