What is RSS?
(based on: Wikipedia)
The abbreviation stands for several things, amongst which ‘Rich Site Summary’ and ‘RDF Site Summary’, but the most widely accepted is ‘Real Simple Syndication’.
RSS is an alternative means of accessing the vast amount of information that now exists on the World Wide Web. Instead of the user browsing websites for information of interest, the information is sent directly to the user. The content is delivered automatically, instantaneously and without viruses, spam and other electronic nuisances.
Users of RSS content use software programs called "feed readers" or "feed aggregators".
The user subscribes to a feed by entering a link of the feed into the reader program.
The reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.
RSS feeds often include the title of the article and a small excerpt or even the whole article. Viewing someone’s feed is referred to as aggregation as you are gathering all of the latest entries. RSS has become extremely popular with blogs as the headline format comes naturally.
The main advantage of RSS is that it allows for ‘web content customizability’:
getting what you want, when you want it!
RSS in Higher Education: Ideas!
In his RSS guide, made available at http://www.weblogg-ed.com/, Will Richardson provides several ideas on the use of RSS in the classroom.
Working with RSS proves to be very useful for students doing research on a specific topic and who want to be kept upt-to-date.
How to get started?
There exist several types of RSS feed readers:
- Browsers with built-in RSS capabilities (e.g. Firefox: live bookmarks, …)
- Newsreaders or aggregators (e.g. NetNewsWire, Mozilla Thunderbird, …)
- Web-based services (e.g. Bloglines, Google Reader,..)
The video below is a visual guide on how to start working with an RSS aggregator and RSS feeds.
