RSS news feeds are now a large part of the rapidly evolving and instantly updating part of the internet.

Depending on who you ask the acronymn RSS may stand for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. The two differing definitions give you a good idea of what the technology of RSS sets out to achieve e.g. a simple means for webmasters to syndicate their content in a summary format.

The idea of a news RSS news feed is to publish frequently updated information in the areas of blog entries, audio and video posts and stories or articles and basic news headlines.

The typical RSS feed involves an RSS document which is often described as a feed  or channel.

Such a feed is a summarised version of recent events or changes made upon a website or blog.

The use of feeds has the happy outcome that webmasters and website viewers and subscribers both benefit in a symbiotic relationship. Both parties benefit in getting what they want. Webmasters get greater traffic from subscribers to their site via the RSS and web surfers can keep up to date with any changes to particlar sites without having to visit them daily to check for changes.

Web feeds benefit the website publishers by letting them syndicate their original and also their newest content automatically.

They benefit readers who want to subscribe toupdates from favourite websites and they can also aggregate feeds from many individual sites into the one place.

RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or aggregator. An aggregator can be utilised and accessed via may mediums such as your desktop, your mobile or via a search engine or your browser toolbar.

Because xml feeds are generally quite well organised and standardised it’s possible for information to be published once  but be viewed by many different programs in many different locations and access mediums

 The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work. It will then download any updates that it finds, while at the same time providing a means of monitoring and reading the feeds it finds. The most common form of file in use with an RSS news feed is an XML file.

RSS formats were first made common in early 1999 and many websites now display the RSS icon to indicate to visitors that their site has a news feed.

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