What is RSS and why should you care? Consensus is that RSS is an acronym for Real Simple Syndication. Syndication is the key word here. Wikipedia defines RSS as “a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs”.
Now, if you’re anything like me (non-techie), that may as well be German. This is how I understand RSS:

Sites that produce vast amounts of content (like ours, or a news site, for example) use RSS to channel their articles/posts in such a way that readers can have the content “delivered” to an “inbox” for their reading pleasure, whenever it suits them, as opposed to visiting the individual sites each day to catch up on fresh news or posts. My RSS reader enables me to wade through far more content (in email format) than if I surfed the individual sites one by one on a daily basis. I find sites or blogs I like, syndicate with them and then wait for the content to arrive on my doorstep. *Click* – just like that!
Forbes.com has just published an article titled The Rise of RSS, which declares that RSS has become mainstream. I’m not sure I agree – RSS is still difficult to understand and for the average internet user, technically challenging.
From the article: “HTML made it easy to display online content, and e-mail made it easy to deliver the content. RSS combines the benefits of the two”.
Over the next few days I will be posting a series on RSS (and it’s related technologies like Atom, tagging, etc.) for my own benefit and hopefully for yours, too.
Watch this space.