What are RSS Feeds and Why You Need a RSS Reader
RSS feed is in a non-HTML format called XML. RSS readers or aggregators can interpret and display that coding, but Web browsers can’t. Soon, RSS/XML readers will be part of every browser and e-mail software. But for now, you need a separate reader. You use an RSS reader to bring new, constantly updated material to you, from all your favorite sites. There is no need to check whether a site has updated.
RSS feeds bring automatically updated information straight to your desktop.
You can monitor news, job listings, personals, and classifieds. Thousands of sites now offer feeds, which you can identify by a small orange button that says either RSS or XML. However, if you click one of these links, you will most likely get a page full of code in your browser. To properly read the feed, you need an RSS reader.
Content published in an RSS feed is typically set up to send out notifications whenever new material is available. This makes the new content immediately available to feed readers and RSS search engines. Contrast this with ordinary web pages, which are essentially passive and generally aren’t accessible to most of us until search engine crawlers find and index them. Once indexed, these pages stand relatively little chance of being read by web searchers on a frequent basis.
Instead of opening your Web browser when you sit down at the computer, you open your news feed reader.
Usually a 2 or 3 paned window that allows you to see at a glance which sites have added content, and to scan clickable headlines and summaries of that content. Imagine looking at update info on 10-20 sites at a single glance, and never waiting for a single page to load!
christopher said,
July 22, 2006 @ 9:53 am
Threshold RSS becoming the mainstream to the browsers, email marketing and media and entertainment industries, the intelligence come right to your door, what you need more.