RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

An RSS or web feed, is a way of allowing people to monitor when websites have added new content. It turns, or syndicates, headlines, articles, pictures and even audio from many websites into a standard format that can be read in one place by a program known as a newsreader or aggregator.

In order to receive an RSS feed you must 'subscribe' to it for free. As soon as new content is posted on the website you have subscribed to, it is received automatically without having to keep visiting the original website.

There are various ways of receiving an RSS feed.

• Web browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari allow their users to add RSS feeds to their list of bookmarks (favourites).
• Personalised portals such as Yahoo! and the Google Personalised Home offer a user-friendly way of subscribing to RSS feeds.
• An online newsreader (such as Bloglines) can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds all on a single easily managed screen.

All of these services are free.

Many news sites, blogs and other collaborative software tools like wikis and collaborative editors automatically generate RSS feeds. Subscribing to these feeds enables collaborators to keep up-to-date with a wide range of relevant information sources, comments and changes to documents in a very time-efficient way. Using RSS, it is quite feasible to keep track of new content on multiple websites with ease.

Pros

• Can keep up-to-date with large numbers of websites quickly
• Information can be easily transferred from one website to another, without having to manually update pages

Cons

• Not very user-friendly to subscribe to RSS feeds
• Not well-known technology in the sector

Beware: can be a source of information overload.

The ICT Hub is offering an RSS feed on their knowledgebase of ICT good practice reources.

Case-study on RSS feeds: VolResource

VolResource aims to provide practical resources for people involved in voluntary or community organisations, making use of communications technology such as a website and email newsletter. Their dynamic news pages give the flexibility to allow voluntary organisations to add their own news.

They have used an off-the-shelf blogging tool (WordPress) to support their news service and at the same time opened up the service so that others can contribute their own news. The ability to categorise news items, a feature of most blog services, enables news items to be keyworded which in turn means that users of the service can subscribe to a subset of the service that is of interest to them.

VolResource found that, once set up, the system is very straightforward to maintain.

However, they report that different versions of RSS can cause confusion for users, although most feed readers/aggregators can cope with most formats. Incorporation of content into website from an RSS feed is still complex. However, this will improve as RSS becomes a standard feature of website content management systems.

View the full VolResource case study

Further reading: ICT Hub's knowledgebase, Wikipedia