RSS Feeds have been around for years but are only now beginning to surface as a new wave on the Web - a wave that helps individuals and businesses connect and share information in a new and very interesting way.

So what exactly are RSS Feeds, and how can individuals and businesses use them? This guide will provide an overview.

RSS allows news and information to be summarized and viewed in compact headlines with the ability to drill down to more detail. RSS also updates content automatically letting you see the latest news and headlines. RSS allows you to see and aggregate many different news sources into one page versus having to click around to many different sites for the same content.

To use RSS you need an RSS Reader. An RSS Reader allows you to select and display any number of RSS feeds. When you visit various web sites, keep a look out for the orange icons that indicate availability of an RSS feed. Subscribing to the RSS feeds is usually done from within an RSS Reader, but is also often done by clicking an orange icon, copying and pasting the URL address of that page into your RSS Reader and then viewing the content.

Another common use of RSS feeds is to display (syndicate) the feed as content on a web site. The process of syndicating varies, but one common way includes placing a small piece of HTML/javascript code on a web-site, similar to the way GoogleAds works. This is especially useful for businesses that have news related information that changes frequently and in which many people have an interest.

An RSS feed itself is just content (text, pictures, even videos) formatted in XML. Clicking the orange icons will let you see the actual feed content and format (with some browsers you may have to do a View Source on the page). You will see that the actual XML/RSS format is not particularly user friendly to read and looks a bit like HTML. However, this format is useful for programs such as RSS Readers and RSS Syndicators that transform the XML into a user friendly format.

There are tens of thousands of popular RSS feeds such as Yahoo's Top Stories and InfoWorld. Getting started is generally very easy. Web-based RSS Readers unlike email based readers are even easier and require nothing to install. For example, Shortwire.com provides a free web-based RSS reader.

RSS feeds present and share information that changes over time. So if your business has information that information-consumers may be interested in, then RSS feeds may be of value. If the information does NOT change frequently, e.g. price list that changes once every 6 months, then RSS feeds are not the right medium for disseminating information. However, if the information does change frequently, then RSS feed may be just the ticket to better business.

Examples of businesses include news agencies, magazines, financial sites, and universities. Another interesting use of RSS feeds is internal to companies and enterprises. Even companies with fewer than 100 employees may find that RSS feeds on the company intranet provides an effective way to share information that changes daily. Instead of emailing this information, employees just view the information through their intranet RSS reader. Shortwire, for example, offers a private label RSS Reader and publishing solution for business.

RSS feeds allow for easy syndication of content by viewing through any RSS reader or by inclusion via simple html/javascript code on any number of web sites.

Business models for the effective use of RSS Feeds are still being discovered. However, a number models are emerging and include the following:

Advertising - If you have content in which people are interested, this will create traffic. Traffic means page views. Advertisers will pay to market products and services to these page views. RSS feeds tend to be monitored - if ever so briefly - more often than other forms of information because of the changing nature of the content. This monitoring creates traffic, not only to the sites that own the content, but also to those that link to the RSS feeds as their sites become more dynamic and useful to users.

Premium content - RSS feeds display headlines and a brief description. For premium content, RSS feeds become a way of allowing users to see what is in a businesses content inventory before buying. If a user then wants the full article, they can buy a subscription or just that article.

Cost reduction - This model uses RSS feeds to replace email lists and costs associated with disseminating information. The email "push" approach has numerous problems including spam, new laws regarding spam, email address churn, bandwidth inefficiency - lots of bytes sent and only a small percentage read. RSS feeds use a filtered "pull" approach, where a user monitors feeds, and only if a match of interest exists is the full article pulled over the internet. The RSS feed itself is generally only an index or table of contents onto the actual content, therefore much less bandwidth is used compared with email.

Business communication - RSS feeds can be used by businesses to capture status reports, changing events over time, B2B communication regarding joint projects, and many other business uses. RSS feeds provide a standard format for capturing and sharing changing information and are accessible via the web both outside and within business firewalls.

If a headline looks interesting, the short accompanying description is read if it exists (not all RSS feeds have a description - some only have the headlines). If the description looks interesting, then the user will click the headline to be taken to a web page which will generally have the full description of the article. Thus, RSS feeds allow a user to monitor many sources of information on a variety of topics in a concise format.

The end effect is that users are more "in the know" about a broad range of topics, web sites receive increased traffic, and the traffic that the web sites receive are visitors who are most interested in the content on that web site since the users have already pre-screened the content via the RSS feed headlines.

Blogs work slightly differently in that the description in many blogs is the full article. In this case, traffic is targeted at the blog directly. The most popular blogs actually become their own websites where the entire content of the web site consists of RSS feeds rendered in HTML. Some examples include lockergnome.com and slashdot.com. In this case the same content can be viewed in an RSS feeds or through the web site and the distinction between blogs and RSS news feeds becomes fuzzy.

Let's pull apart that definition piece by piece below.

"RSS feeds..." - "RSS" stands for "Really Simple Syndication", and as the name indicates, it provides a framework for syndicating - or making available - information to a wide audience.

"...are files..." - Just like any of the files you are familiar with on a personal computer, an RSS feed is ultimately just a file that resides on a computer. Some files are binary and some are text. An RSS Feed file is text. This means you could open an RSS Feed in MS Notepad or any other text editor and read its contents.

"...in XML format..." - RSS feeds have a specific format for organizing the chronological text information contained within the RSS feed. The format is not particularly user friendly, although it is human readable, and one could actually read the raw RSS feed format. However most people use an RSS reader which formats the RSS feed into something more user friendly.

What is XML format? It stands for "eXtensible Markup Language", and is a simple text based approach to describing data using tags. Tags are simple text markers that surround the actual text. For example, <HEADLINE>Rover lands on Mars</HEADLINE> is a fragment of simple XML. The tag consists of the opening tag <HEADLINE> and the closing tag </HEADLINE>, the only difference being that the closing tag is prefaced with a slash after the <. This piece of XML tells us that Rover lands on Mars is a HEADLINE.

You can see that there could be an infinite number of ways to describe data with XML as HEADLINE could just as easily be NEWSITEM or any other descriptive tag. That is why standardization of the XML tags is needed, to allow publishers of RSS feeds and RSS readers be able to understand the XML tags that make up an RSS feed. It turns out that some standardization has occurred and RSS feeds are published using predefined XML tags allowing RSS readers to interpret the XML tags for appropriate user friendly display.

As with all standards, they evolve over time. The RSS standards of what the XML tags should be called and how the tags are organized are referred to as "versions". Common RSS versions are called: 0.91, 0.92 0.93, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.3, 1.0. A flexible RSS reader would be able to read, interpret and display any encountered version. The Shortwire RSS Reader is an example of a flexible RSS reader.

Here is a complete RSS Feed with one entry item:

<?xml version="1.0" ?> <rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title>Shortwire News</title> <link>http://shortwire.com</link> <description>Latest News from Shortwire.com</description> <language>en-us</language> <copyright>2003 Shortwire.com</copyright> <lastBuildDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2003 10:57:18 MST</lastBuildDate> <managingEditor>webmaster@shortwire.com</managingEditor> <ttl>60</ttl> <item> <title>RSS Reader private label solution</title> <link>http://shortwire.com</link> <description> Complete hosted and turn-key RSS reader branded with your company branding drives traffic, keeps users in the know, reduces email problems. </description> <pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2003 10:57:18 MST</pubDate> <guid>http://shortwire.com/1068271038019</guid> </item> </channel> </rss>

"...that reside on computers..." - they do reside on computers, but more specifically, they reside on computers generally referred to as "servers" - because they "serve" you the RSS Feed(s) when you ask for them - much in the same way that servers serve you web pages when you ask for them. In the case of a web page, you ask for the web page to be served to you, through a browser like MS Internet Explorer by typing in the familiar "web address", or URL (Uniform Resource Locator), of the page, e.g. http://www.shortwire.com. This address maps to a specific file on a server. In the case of RSS feeds, an RSS reader, instead of a browser, is used to view the feeds.

"...that capture chronological entries." - RSS feeds can be used to capture all sorts of information, but at its root, RSS feeds capture chronological information. For example, news headlines are a great example of information that changes steadily over time and is perfect for capture in an RSS feed. An RSS feed of top news might be updated every 10 minutes showing a new headline at the top of the RSS Feed. An RSS news feed displayed in an RSS Reader might look like this:

Each headline in the above example is a link to the full news article, and this feed would change over time with new articles showing on top as older articles move their way to the bottom and eventually off the stack. There are thousands of RSS feeds available from which to select - from headline news to business news to astronomy to software development notes to job ads.

But RSS feeds are not just for news. RSS also provides a great format for web logs - often referred to as "blogs" for short. Blogs also provide information in chronological order. The content and purposes of blogs varies widely; from diaries, to poetry, to journals, to what's new, and even short stories. Blogs communicate in a way that is easier to understand than email or discussion forums and are often used in small groups such as sports and family groups.

In terms of the differences - web pages provide a lot of content in no particular time order, whereas RSS Feeds provide headlines (and sometimes a short description) and are always in chronological order. Web pages can have many links to take you to different web pages. RSS Feeds typically only link the headline, which, when clicked, will go to a web page which has the full content. Therefore, RSS Feeds act like a clickable table of contents for the content on a web site. Of course, as mentioned earlier, not all RSS Feeds are headlines, some RSS Feeds such as personal blogs do not link to a web page for the full article, but are the full article themselves.

Almost all readers work the same way, in that you specify what feeds you want to read by either typing in the URL directly or selecting feeds from a list and then viewing the feeds. Readers differ in their features. Features may include the ability to save clips in a personal file cabinet and the ability to change settings about how the feeds are viewed - e.g. show just the headlines or show headlines with a description.

The basic behavior is to search for feeds of interest, add those feeds to the RSS reader, monitor the headlines periodically, and if a headline looks interesting, click the headline and read the full article on the linked web page.

As we mentioned above, an RSS feed is simply a file in XML format that resides on a server. One could therefore, hand craft the file, using any text editor (like Notepad) with the appropriate XML, place the file on a web server with an extension of .xml, and when someone enters the web address, e.g. http://yoursite.com/your-rss-feed.xml, the user will see the raw RSS file displayed through their desktop browser. Or that user could enter the address in their RSS reader and see the RSS feed displayed in a user friendly format.

Most people don't want to, or have the time, to hand craft an RSS feed in XML format. Therefore, RSS publishing software exists. Publishing software, in essence, provides a user friendly interface which allows someone who wishes to publish, to enter the information in a form. The publishing software will then craft the XML with the correct syntax instead of the user having to do it manually.

We need to draw a distinction between the creation of the RSS feed and the actual publishing of the feed. Anyone can create an RSS feed, by hand crafting or by using a publishing tool (better referred to as an RSS creation tool). However, no one will be able to read the feed or even know about the feed. Therefore, publishing is really the step of taking an existing RSS feed and placing it on a web server so that others can access the file.

This is really no different from what happens with a web page. Anyone can create an HTML web page, but until it is placed on a web server, it cannot be accessed via a browser. So RSS publishing software often combines the features of creating the feed with the ability to place it on some server. The placing of the file on a server usually involves simply "FTP'ing" the file over to a production web server. The FTP'ing (File Transfer Protocol) is automated in RSS publishers, so that you just specify the address and directory of where you want the RSS feed placed and hit a submit button.

The flexible aspect of the web is that the RSS feed could reside on any server accessible via some web address. This means the RSS feed does not necessarily need to reside on the same server as the associated web site. For blogs, most users do not have their own web server, and simply place their personal RSS feeds/blogs on a site (server) that allows them to host their blog. The same is true of business or news type RSS feeds. These feeds could be placed on a hosted server and there is no requirement that an RSS feed needs to reside on the same server as the business web site. This concept is often referred to as "RSS hosting". Shortwire, for example, allows business customers to publish their RSS feeds to either the shortwire servers (thus providing an RSS hosting service) or publish their RSS feeds to any FTP accessible location such as its own servers.

Thus a normal cycle of content creation for RSS feeds involves opening an RSS creation/publishing tool, specifying the new items of news or content, publishing that updated feed and then starting over when the next item is ready to be published. When users read the feed they will see the timestamp of when this feed was published. The feeds themselves, in the XML, indicate a "time to live" or TTL, which refers to how often an RSS reader should re-retrieve the RSS feed. For example, headline news may have a TTL of 5 meaning 5 minutes whereas a magazine summary may have a TTL of 1440 (24 hours).

Another aspect to publishing RSS feeds is making them viewable within a web page in addition to viewable through an RSS reader. This trick essentially embeds a reader within a web page to retrieve the RSS feed and display the feed in HTML. To the user, it looks just like a web page, but underneath, part of the web page is static HTML whereas another part of the page is dynamic RSS feed content formatted into HTML. This embedded RSS reader is often accomplished by placing a simple snippet of javascript code on the web page where the RSS feed content is to be displayed. The javascript snippet (no more than a few lines long) instructs the browser in real time to retrieve an RSS feed formatted into html and insert it into the location in place of the snippet.

This means a business could inform other web sites, by including a small javascript fragment, that their site can provide real time content from an RSS feed. For example, a web site that has frequently changing news in a particular domain, could make its RSS feeds available to be included on many other sites that have an interest in that news. It provides the other sites a mini real time window into the news site from their own site. This is syndication - hence RSS - Really Simple Syndication.

The business benefit includes more dynamic content, more interested users, increased traffic, exchange of information, targeted visitors and advertising exposure. RSS feeds also alleviate the issues surrounding e-mail and spam as RSS feeds are permission based by definition. By a simple inclusion of code on any number of sites, a business with a popular RSS feed can now be syndicated across any number of other sites.

Shortwire.com provides solutions for both consumers and businesses, including a web based RSS reader, RSS creator, RSS syndicator, private label RSS readers, and consulting services.

Please direct comments or questions to webmaster@shortwire.com