What is RSS and Syndication?

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"...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought." - Albert Einstein

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Tuesday, November 07, 2006

What is RSS and Syndication?

I don’t want to make this entry too long. It’s not going to get technical. I have been trying to think of how I would explain RSS and Syndication to someone totally computer ignorant. I came up with the following. There are other ways to use RSS but this is the most common.

Do you remember way back when you were a little tyke on Sunday mornings? The newspaper would come and dad would pick it up to read it? Mom would ask dad to separate the circulars, entertainment and ‘living’ sections. You would ask for the comics. Your brother or sister would fight you for them. When you got older you also would ask for the sports section. The newspaper would never go back together the right way, IF you could find all the separated pieces.

Now let’s fast forward to 2006. Through the magic of RSS you can customize and receive only the news subjects you are interested in and in the order you want as it happens. There is another major earth shattering change that this brings. Imagine that ANYONE can be a publisher and deliver news as effectively as any major newspaper or magazine! No longer do you need a huge investment in publishing and distribution! Finally, as an RSS subscriber you can get your news IMMEDIATELY! Why wait for the next morning to get election polling results or commentary. Get commentary on election events AS THEY HAPPEN!

If you want to subscribe to an RSS news feed you need a news reader. There are many news readers on the internet. The one I happen to use is my.yahoo.com . When you open a my.yahoo account, and it’s free, you can customize one or more pages. On each page you can customize headlines from any RSS source on the globe. Every morning I open my page to see the news from Reuters, AP, PC magazine, and my favorite blog’s.

If a web page publishes RSS it is indicated by an icon as thus:

Perhaps you will customize your own news aggregator page and subscribe to the newsfeed from this blog, www.damon4.com .

admin4 at 3:07 PM |
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