Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication is what RSS means. This is a “format for syndicating news and the content of news”. If you look for some information with the RSS format, it is likely that the information you get is more or less what you wanted, and you get it quickly and updated as well.
Its structure is made up of items, and each item has a title, a summary of a text and a link to the original source in the web where the whole text is located. The RSS files have a summary of what has been published in the original website, but there are not only news, but also changes on a website can be shown, or “the revision history of a book”.
You can obtain and offer information with the RSS, since those files contain meta data about the information sources; but to share information, some software and an aggregator are needed. The programs that can read the RSS sources are the feeds, and the aggregator can be installed in the user’s computer, although some searchers have it included in their programs, and another way is to register in the web site of the aggregator.
So if you like a site and you know that you’ll visit it quite often, you should register to a feed, for you are informed when the site is brought up to date, when new information has been included etc. And if you are the one who wants to offer information, you have to create your own feed and update it quite often to make it interesting for the rest of the users.
References:
- Nacho(editor). ¿Qué es RSS-y XML, RDF, Atom,…?. (2004, May 18). In Microsiervos. Retrieved 11:21, February 8, 2009, from http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/internet/que-es-rss-y-xml-rdf-atom.html
- Mark Pilgrim(editor). What is RSS?. (2002, December 18). In O’ Reilly XML.com. Retrieved 11:37, February 8, 2009, from http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html?page=1
- RSS ¿qué es?.(2000). In Euroresidentes. Retrieved 11: 48, February 8, 2009, from http://www.euroresidentes.com/Diversion/Internet/rss.htm
- Mónica Pérez Esteban(editor). ¿Qué es el RSS?.(2006, March 26). In Guía fácil del RSS. Retrieved 12:03, February 8, 2009, from http://es.geocities.com/rss_guia_facil/que_es_rss.html
