What is RSS and how can I use it in my business?

July 21, 2:12 PMPhiladelphia Business Technology ExaminerNicole Newman

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The internet can be used as a research tool for information. The only problem is that information is constantly changing. This presents a challenge to business owners. Once your website is set with information, how often do you go back and keep it the information new and exciting? When your customers, prospects, friends and family have seen the current information, there is no reason to go back unless the website presents new information. How do you keep the website filled with new and exciting information without spending all your time? That is the question RSS was designed to answer!

Here are the details from the man made dictionary, www.wikipedia.com. RSS (most commonly translated as "Really Simple Syndication" but sometimes "Rich Site Summary") is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed's URI – often referred to informally as a "URL" (uniform resource locator). The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

RSS formats are specified using XML, XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a general purpose specification for creating custom markup languages. It is classified as an extensible language, because it allows the user to define the markup elements. XML's purpose is to aid information systems in sharing structured data, especially via the Internet, to encode documents, and to serialize data; in the last context, it compares with text-based serialization languages XML's set of tools helps developers in creating web pages but its usefulness goes well beyond that. XML, in combination with other standards, makes it possible to define the content of a document separately from its formatting, making it easy to reuse that content in other applications or for other presentation environments. Most importantly, XML provides a basic syntax that can be used to share information between different kinds of computers, different applications, and different organizations without needing to pass through many layers of conversion.

Now I used the bloglines reader to collect all the information on my company, Newman Networks on ONE page (http://www.nicoleloves.com). This page contains just the summary  information so we no longer need to update web pages. The RSS reader, www.bloglines.com , will automatically get the new posts made on  Facebook, the attendees to the Philadelphia M3 Meetup and even new articles on this page of the examiner! Here is the RSS feed of my links from my facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/feeds/share_posts.php?id=707037066&viewer=707037066&key=153082350f&format=rss20