RSS: Rich Site Summary

What is RSS?
Rich Site Summary, commonly known as RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document is also referred to as a feed, web feed, or channel. It includes full or condensed text, publishing dates, and authorship.

Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them automatically syndicate content. This is beneficial to readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from preferred websites or to combine feeds from many sites into one place.

Benefits and Reasons for using RSS
RSS is the simple resolution for people who use the web on the regular. It allows these users to easily stay informed by recovering the latest content from the sites which they are most interested in. People who use RSS save time by not having to visit each site separately. Because you don’t have to commit to any newsletter nor provide personal information, your privacy is ensured. Sites such as Yahoo News and Google News offer RSS feeds. RSS is shaping up to be a very popular and useful means for communicating. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.

Other uses
Besides notifying you about changes to websites and news headlines, RSS is often used for many other purposes. A web page is not always necessary to be associated with the items listed. Sometimes the information you may desire will be located in the titles and descriptions themselves.

There does not even have to be a web page associated with the items listed -- sometimes all the information you need may be in the titles and descriptions themselves.

Commonly Mentioned Uses
Notification of the arrival of new products in a store
Listing and notifying you of newsletter issues, including email newsletters
Weather and other alerts of changing conditions
Notification of additions of new items to a database, or new members to a group

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