A brief history of RSS

If you’ve been reading blogs for a while then the world of RSS is most likely old news. The New York Times was the first major news organization to offer its readers the option of subscribing to RSS feeds, back in 2002, and since then it’s become the de facto standard for syndicating online content.

So, since 2002 is eons ago in Internet time, surely RSS is so ingrained in web culture that it’s hardly worth discussing? Well not really. Over the past few months I’ve made a conscious effort to get outside of the insular tech community and understand how real people use real technology in the real world. I’ve discovered that perhaps two thirds of my friends and family have either never heard of RSS or have a vague notion of what it is but have never seen it in the wild, so to speak. Another testament to the technology community’s chronic inability to explain itself…

So, what is RSS and why should you care?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which is of precisely no help in explaining what it is. A better explanation is that RSS makes the content you see on websites “portable”, so you can read it in places other than on the website itself. Most commonly RSS feeds are read in RSS readers, which allow the user to subscribe to as many different feeds as they care to. The result? Instead of bouncing from website to website looking for articles and other new content, simply open up your RSS reader and you’ll instantly have access to all of your favourite websites. My fire hose analogy is all about the extent to which there is an overwhelming volume of content online, but RSS readers allow you to control the flow…

Here’s a snapshot of my RSS reader, illustrating all of the websites I subscribe to.

Because I prefer its Mac OS friendly interface and speed, I still use NewsFire, when many people have moved on to Google Reader, but the principle’s the same in either case. The list of blogs shown here might seem overwhelming, but think how much easier it is to dip into individual articles from each rather than surf from one website to the next. By default, posts are sorted by date (most recent first), so particularly for websites that push out frequent and time-sensitive information, it’s a great way to stay on top of breaking news.

But the best thing about RSS is that it’s all about you having control over the content you’re subscribed to. If you don’t feel like reading any given blog on any given day, then don’t, but it’s instantly available should you choose to do so, and it’s all in one place.

RSS and your blog

As I’ve written elsewhere, regardless of which business you’re in, blogs can be massively helpful with everything from engaging your audience to search engine optimization. And every blogging platform provides RSS feeds of your content by default. But there’s a lot you can do to improve both the experience your readers have and the information you receive about who’s reading what and when. Rather than use the default WordPress feed, we use FeedBurner, which means we get stats about the number of subscribers and which articles are most popular. I won’t go in to the details of setting up FeedBurner here, except to say that it’s (a) very straightforward and (b) definitely worth doing!

Recapping: Five steps to get started with RSS

1. Start with Google Reader (no software to download so you can get started in seconds). All you need is a Gmail or Google Apps email address to sign in.
2. Once you’re signed up / signed in, simply click on the Add Subscription button in the left-hand pane and enter in the address of the website to which you’d like to subscribe. Google Reader is smart enough to discover the RSS feed(s) for the websites you enter.
3. As you add websites to your list of subscriptions you’ll see them show up in a list underneath the Add Subscription option. Click on any website in your list and the recent articles from that website will display in the reading pane.
4. We all love to leave comments on blogs, but typically that can’t be done from within the RSS reader. Simply click on the specific article on which you’d like to comment and you’ll be taken to the article on the website itself.
5. Oh, and step five is a really simple one… Make sure that our website is first in your list of RSS subscriptions!

Questions, comments? Simply reply to this post and I’ll do my best to answer.