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RSS
FEEDS
What
are RSS feeds and Why Some Websites Need Them?
RSS
stands for “Really Simple Syndication",
"Rich Site Summary,” and "RDF Site
Summary." RSS feeds are a syndication
format developed in 1999 by Netscape.
Since then, RSS syndication has grown in
popularity especially for aggregating updates
for blogs as well as for organizing and
summarizing ever changing news content so that
the readers don’t have to visit countless
sites to obtain their daily dose of current
happenings.
RSS feeds make it easier for readers to
quickly access the information they want. Once
readers subscribed to a website's RSS feed, the
readers then receive automatic updates.
Possibly, the main benefit of RSS feeds
is that you can attract increase traffic to
your website by simply updating the feed
frequently. However, this is not a guarantee
for every site.
RSS feeds have
the added benefit of providing anonymity to
subscribers as they do not have to provide
their e-mail address or any other personal
information.
As
wonderful as RSS feeds sound, they do have
several disadvantages.
To start with, they do not guarantee
good content. In order to find good content and
blogs, it requires hard word on the internet
user’s part.
Quite often, internet users happen upon
websites, which appear feed subscription
worthy, but then the site only provides a few
quality posts. This frustration over the lack
of quality content is a growing complaint,
which has also led to another complaint
concerning clutter in feed aggregator.
Sadly, RSS feeds are becoming much like
email boxes, in that clutter is making them
difficult to keep organized and clean. It is
true that RSS feeds are timely as the enable
subscribers to receive updates and any breaking
news reports as soon as they happen.
Another disadvantage of RSS feeds is
that they are a bandwidth waster as they
automatically download RSS files and check for
updates and changes.
Another disadvantage is that the content
in RSS feeds does not lend itself to search
engines. Most
search engines have RSS feeds, however they
often do not distinguish between new and old
content.
Despite
these disadvantages, RSS feeds are continuously
being used and adopted for many applications
including news, weather forecasts, package
tracking, blogging, podcasting, and much, much
more. It’s
true that RSS feeds have been around for quite
some time now, it wasn’t until recently the
RSS feeds have become mainstream.
RSS
feeds have become so popular lately that many
Web designers are placing RSS feeds on their
sites even though their websites do not benefit
or need newsletters.
However for those who do need and use RSS feeds, they
have discovered that RSS feeds are the tool
that can help them maintain a site newsletter
with very little effort. With RSS feeds there
isn’t any need to remove addresses, find new
subscribers, or even format the content. This
is because RSS feed allows users to send their
subscribers updated information efficiently,
frequently and easily.
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