Let’s begin with a brief explanation. RSS provides a method for easily sharing information on the web  – headlines, newsclips, information updates, and so forth. Many people find it confusing for a couple of reasons:

1. In describing it, we use terms that we’re not accustomed to using very often, at least not within the realm of technology (words such as ’syndication’ and ‘feed’). So when we see a link that allows us to ’subscribe to our feed’, we don’t really understand what that means since we have so little to compare it to. In other words, we don’ t have similar experiences that would help us to fill in some of the blanks.

2. There are actually two very different perspectives from which the concept can be viewed, and these two perspectives are rarely differentiated for us. The two perspectives are as follows:

a. Content Consumer

b. Content Developer

As a content consumer, we may be interested in having information delivered to our computers easily and automatically.

As a content developer, purveyers of information may want to easily and automatically provide that information to content consumers.

These are really just two sides of the same coin. Let’s think of it in terms of a newspaper or magazine subscription. There are two roles: one of the consumer, who subscribes to the newspaper or magazine. Thus, information is ‘fed’ to them. The other role is that of the content developer, who provides or ‘feeds’  information to the consumer of their content. Thus, the content developer delivers or ’submits’ information to the consumer who has subscribed to the ‘feed’.

Simple enough? Well, there’s another element to round out the picture. When we subscribe to a magazine, we don’t actually get the information directly from the content developers. There’s a go-between – the distributor (or ‘publisher’ if you will).  The content developers provide information to the distributor, and the distributor makes that information available to the individual consumer using a vehicle such as a newsstand, or an online magazine or news service.

Now consider this. We have a couple of choices about how to go about retrieving the information we’re interested in. We can either do it very laboriously, by manually retrieving it by visiting a newsstand or an online news site – or we can have the information delivered to us automatically by subscribing to a physical newspaper or magazine, or in the case of an online news service, we can subscribe to their RSS feed.

The term ‘news’ service has been used rather loosely here, because in reality, all sorts of information can be delivered to us automatically through RSS feeds – the latest sports scores, weather reports, stock prices, or notification of the latest hot deals at Overstock.com.

In order to be read and displayed properly, information conveyed via an RSS feed must be interpreted by and displayed through a software application (either web-based or client-based) called an RSS Reader. This is no different from needing an Internet browser (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox) to display a web page, or a needing Adobe Reader to display a ‘PDF’ document.

If you’re a website owner, you can subscribe to a feed from a company like Amazon, and have their products displayed automatically on your website. Conversely, as a website owner, you can provide information about your website to an RSS submission service (i.e., the ‘distributor’) so that others can automatically receive information from you as you update your content.

That’s the story of RSS in a nutshell. Not so hard after all, was it?