|
Search engines do a good job in finding specific information on the Internet but are not so good when you want to find news on the Internet. Either you have to visit many different news sites or add yourself to yet another e-mail subscription list and suffer e-mail overload. RSS, a standard for syndicating news feeds, is becoming a popular way for web sites and individuals to plug into a stream of news headlines from thousands of different sources.
RSS defines a format for syndicating content and metadata over the Internet and is one of the most widely used XML standards. (The acronym stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary depending on your preference). An RSS Channel created by a publisher can be added to a Web page or read by an RSS newsreader. This popular format is probably the first example of an XML standard that most users will experience and interact with. It augurs well for the future of XML that it manages and formats news feeds so effectively.
RSS was designed to syndicate news items published by commercial organisations. (For example, Bloor Research provides RSS links to syndicate articles from its Web sites). The rapid increase in the use of RSS is due to its popularity in the Weblog community. Technorati, a California-based Internet research think tank, estimates that there are 750,000 Weblogs - many of them arising among employees inside corporations. Many of these Weblogs provide RSS syndication.
Two facilities were needed to transform the RSS syndication standard from a niche product to a generally useful and popular service: tools to organise the news feeds into a standard format (newsreaders) and tools to find content in RSS format.
|