RSS: What It Is and Why You Should Care

The Internet is a smorgasbord of information. Different web pages and apps organize information in a manner they think best serve their readers. However, if you want to follow content, information, and updates from a multitude of sites, it can get little overwhelming and time-consuming to sift through those things that you need and don’t. That’s where RSS feeds come in handy.

What is RSS?

RSS can stand for “Rich Site Summary” or “RDF Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication,” depending on when, where, and from whom you ask the question. In essence, it is a standardized format for delivering web content that is regularly changing or updated. Hence, several news-related websites, blogs, and online publishers use RSS Feed and other news aggregators to syndicate their content.

Why Should You Care?

If you are an old school voracious web content consumer, you’ve probably used bookmarking a lot. Bookmarking or “favoriting” web pages was a way to keep track of sites and content that you’ve found, accidentally or not, and have decided to continue reading or come back to it next time, and perhaps even regularly.

Bookmarking made use of the web browser to remember visited sites and manually return to them with a few clicks and not entering the entire URL each time. It was efficient for quite some time. Until it wasn’t anymore. It soon became clunky and inefficient in tracking so many websites.

What’s more, since you had to manually access them, if you forgot to do so, you’ll miss some updates. It was not automatic and people began searching for a better way. Getting email updates or newsletters was another option, but users did not have control and regularly checking emails.

Soon, a better technology had been developed that eliminated manually accessing those sites for new content and updates, where users had more privacy and control—RSS. RSS eliminated the need to bookmark and manually return to websites. It also offered an alternative for those who prefer not to give away their email addresses and subscribe to newsletters, ezines, etc.

RSS became a useful tool for automatically filtering content that is relevant. And if some web content eventually becomes irrelevant, RSS feeds for such content can easily be turned off with a few clicks. Hence, RSS protects users from spam and unsolicited sales emails while promoting control of the delivery of their desired content.

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