How does an RSS Feed help ?

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By Arnab March 20, 2007 filed in Miscellaneous, Internet Marketing

RSS came into existence after a long line of similar formats that were used for syndication. However, none of them became as popular as this because of one drawback – a majority of these formats were only programmed to work with a single service. These early versions were born from ‘push’ and ‘pull’ technologies; Backweb and Poincast are two examples of this category.

The first version of RSS was RDF Site Summary that was produced in the year 1999 by Dan Libby from Netscape. This became fairly popular and was named as RSS 0.9 from the various suggestions and comments by the users. Libby then formed a format that was based on the similar model and called it RSS 0.91. Unfortunately, RSS and XML were both left off by Netscape without any owner just at the time when it was gaining popularity. To save this, a working group and mailing list, RSS DEV was set up by the various patrons to allow XML to continue its development. After a variety of modifications, in November 2005, Microsoft proposed to rename its Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS. One month later, Microsoft and Outlook both came forward to announce that in their blogs they would be using the ‘feed icon’ that was first used in Mozilla Firefox browser. This picture was used as an industry standard for both RSS and related formats like Atom.

The many uses of RSS:

The use of a feed reader (also called an aggregator) is to examine a list of “feeds” on behalf of the web user and present updated articles, if any. If you frequent the Internet, you can easily locate web feeds on almost all the websites, big or small. While some of these only provide RSS or Atom format, quite a few even permit the users to choose between RSS or Atom formatted web feed.

All the RSS aware programs can be used for different operating systems – the client-side readers as well as aggregators are used as extensions to the web browsers. In fact there are some browsers that have included support for the RSS feeds; you can also transform the RSS feeds into different usenet articles and watch them through the softwares Mozilla Thunderbird or Forte Agent.

Certain Internet based feed readers like YourLiveWire on the other hand does not need any software installation for the consumers’s feeds to be viewable on any computer that has an access to the Web.

Why should I add RSS to my website?

The few reasons why I feel RSS should be added to any website are:

* By adding RSS the website owner can organize the contents in a general format that can be accessed by other websites.
* RSS helps both the email client manufacturers and users to control any kind of spam; this is because unlike other emails RSS is not ‘sent’. Instead it is the user who selects and collects the news feed thus giving him or her a complete control over the whole situation. The user has to request for a new feed and has the power to cancel it anytime. This system completely avoids the need for spam filters.
* This is also beneficial as it updates all the registered email users about any changes in the website.
* Obviously if the website is so accurate and meticulous that it constantly updates its users about any changes, however small it may be, it is bound to attract a huge amount of traffic!