A Cat’s View: RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web 2.0 technology that can give people upto date news stories and information at the touch of a button.

Basically people can subscribe to their favourite sites (let’s take BBC news website as an example) and instead of having to manually check for breaking news headlines, they can instead look at the RSS feed and it’ll have the most recent news from the site on there. It might not be the full content, or it might actually be the full story, but either way people can get the news where ever they are.

RSS does not just have to be news sites though, it can be blogs, or anything in which the RSS symbol is (the symbol is this big orange sign, although it is a lot smaller on sites..)

To get these RSS updates you will need an RSS reader. One such RSS reader is called ‘Feed Demon’ which can be downloaded for free, then you subscribe and get your updates on this.
You can also get RSS updates on phones. The phone I currently have came with a built in RSS reader, and so I could access my RSS feeds on the go if I wanted to.
Also iGoogle makes use of RSS feeds in some of its applications, such as the football and BBC news ones on my iGoogle (shown below in the link)
http://img526.imageshack.us/img526/4411/igooiq2.jpg

Now I can see how RSS would be useful for those people in industry, but for me I’m not really interested at the moment. Although it is good to see headlines on my google page, I just end up going onto the site anyway so I would go there myself. And I only ever used the RSS on my phone to check it out, just because I was curious. And I did download feed demon, but I didn’t find it any help, and I much prefer to look things up myself that have things like that sent, because you might not be able to rely on it all of the time, and when I go on a web site I like to have a good look around, so although the RSS could be handy, I currently have no real use for it.

But saying that I can see that RSS has a big future, and a big place in industry.