Recently we posted about RSS vs e-Mail. Maybe we should have started by the root of the thing... What the RSS acronym stands for? What is RSS and how does it work?

Technically speaking RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication, and is a standard form of representing contents by using a special XML schema.

Oh my!!!! This maybe doesn't mean anything to you, so lets explain it in simple and day-life terms.

I bet that you like a lot of web pages. Many of them are about your job and professional interests. Others are about your hobbies, news, and this kind of things. You usually want to visit this pages in order to read the new contents they are publishing. If you dare to visit nothing more than a few of them you, literally, are spending hours a week getting this information.

What if you could get the new contents right at your desktop, without needing to visit them anymore?

This is what RSS gives you. Let's see it graphically:

First af all, the page you're interested in must export it's contents to RSS. You know that it is doing this, because usually it somewhere will have an icon (orange one) with the RSS or XML word in it. Clicking on it shows the contents (in an strange way usually, because is XML). In most modern browsers like  Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox or Safari, you can also have an orange toolbar icon like the one in the above picture that shows that a page has an RSS source for its contents (or RSS feed).

You can check an example of all this in our main webpage (http://www.krasis.com/) or even in this blog! :-)

This is represented in the figure above by the webpages on the right and the arrows.

Well. That's OK. You have the source but, how do you use it?

Here is where the element in the middle of the image fits. You need an RSS Aggregator or Feed Reader to consume the feeds. As of today, there are lots of feed readers in the market. We recommend an on-line service like Bloglines (in the picture) or Google Reader because you can access them from any computer even on the road or through your mobile phone. They are free and work in any web browser in the market. Naturally you have a lot of other options in the desktop, like Omea Reader, Newsgator, or even the new Microsoft's Outlook 2007 or Windows Vista Sidebar. Just make your choice!

In this feed readers you have all the contents from your favourite pages served, without needing to visit them. This saves you time and effort, and you keep informed in a timely manner.

So, hurry up, get a feed reader and start to aggregate the contents you like right now!

The marketeers point of view

Obviously the proliferation of RSS and people not visting your page it's a big challenge for you as a marketeer. But you can't afford not having an RSS feed of your contents in these days. So... how does this affect you? How can you take advantage of it?

Stay tuned! We are going to tell you in future posts.

Update (13/11/2007): Look at this terrific video from CommonCraft that explains RSS in "plain english". Great!