What Is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Every blog is published into at formats:

• The HTML that you view in your web browser
• RSS

Have you ever seen an old movie where the actor is reading the news off a ticker-tape? That's what the RSS version of a blog is like: No pretty colors, no pretty banner, just the content.

Why is RSS interesting?

• HTML produces content designed to be read by humans
• RSS produces content designed to be read by computer programs.

One common use of RSS is to connect a blog's RSS (sometimes call'ed the blog's feed) to a program called a Feed Reader. You can plug the feeds of dozens or hundreds of blogs into your feed reader and easily consume the content from all of them.

Another common use of RSS is that it allows you to re-purpose content.  For example, you can easily display the content of your blog on a website.  IN fact, you could easily display the content of several blogs on a single website.

Most of the news websites like CNN can deliver their news as an RSS feed.  Some forms of Google search can be delivered as an RSS feed.  The result is that it is very easy to build your own information aggregator that delivers a wide range of news and information all in one nicely organized spot.