RSS Awareness Day

I’ve just found out that 1st May is RSS Awareness Day! I’m aware that most people I know, outside of the tech/blogging sphere, don’t use RSS or are even aware what RSS is, so I’m quite pleased that RSS Awareness Day exists to promote it.

For the complete lowdown on RSS Awareness Day go to www.rssday.org, where you can find out what RSS actually is, what is can do and how it can benefit you. For a quick primer, read this quote from the site:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.

The main benefit of RSS is that it enables people to stay connected with their favorite websites without having to visit them. Once you subscribe to a particular RSS feed, you will automatically receive updates from the website that publishes the feed, whenever they release new content.

So basically you have an RSS reader, which can be an online tool (like Google Reader, which I use) or a software application (like RSSReader) and you subscribe to all the feeds from sites you’re interested in (like mine at http://blog.ryanajarrett.com/feed/). Then updates from the sites will be displayed in your RSS reader for you to read at your leisure. You can categorise your feeds to make them easier to navigate, and some newsreaders will “mark as read” items that are over a certain age (I really wish Google Reader did this).

I currently subscribe to 203 RSS feeds. Not all of these are still active (I really should go through them and delete some) but I wouldn’t be able to visit 203 websites every day to check to see what has been updated, let alone several times a day. But with Google Reader I can go back when I like, check my favourite feeds, skim over others quickly (digg, for example, has several hundred entries per day).

So you see, RSS makes life a lot easier. Practically all blogs have an RSS feed, as do most major news sites. As more information is thrown at us, we need a more practical way of dealing with it, and RSS is that way.