RSS Rocks
RSS -- Really Simple Syndication -- is very, very cool. This is the best way to view and disseminate many kinds of information on the Web.
If you are running Firefox as your browser, you can add the free Sage reader and use it to "cruise" RSS feeds -- such as BBC world news or (to be self-referential) the GooglePlex Blog. The are also a whole bunch of RSS Readers available for free or at nominal cost for Internet Explorer or as desktop standalones. (In a plain browser, these feeds appear as XML files.)
Things start to get really interesting when you are publishing blog content using a content management system (CMS) like MoveableType. MoveableType automatically creates a syndication feed for you based on your blog content.
Readers can view your syndication feed in their RSS Readers. You can push your feed out to RSS aggregators (here's a Web form that let's you submit an RSS feed to a whole bunch of aggregators at one time). This gets your content out, and makes it easy for people to find your content. Finally, you can also display RSS feed content on plain Web pages using a number of techniques.
I'll be writing more about this stuff in days to come!
Posted by Harold Davis at January 24, 2005 01:07 PM
