mezzoblue ��� What is RSS/XML/Atom/Syndication?

I've found myself having to explain RSS syndication a few times in the past week or so. It's always worth reminding myself that not everyone knows what I know (though I try to forget that the reverse is also true!) While I have long known that there are still some people out there using Netscape 4 because it never occurred to them to update it, I ignore the fact that there are people who have never heard of RSS.

Which is a shame as I really do think it has the potential to be a "big thing" for the internet, particularly for those of us who graze information like whales eat plankton.

There are a few explanations of RSS out there, some very technical, but this one over at mezzoblue today looks a good place to start if it's new to you.

I really do recommend getting hold of a news reader (I use NetNewsWire in its free version on my iMac and swear by it). I actually think I've stopped watching the news on TV and buying a newspaper now, because my RSS subscriptions to the BBC and Guardian newspaper seem to fulfill all my needs. I also subscribe to a lot of design-related blogs. Now I just double click on a headline and intro that grab my attention and away I go.

As mezzoblue puts it:

"What if there were ... some way to have your list of bookmarks notify you when the sites you read have been updated? You wouldn�t waste time checking those that haven�t. Instead of loading 30 sites a day, you might only need to load 13. Cutting your time in half would enable you to start monitoring more sites, so for the same amount of time you originally invested in checking each site manually, you may just end up end up following twice as many."

If you've not tried it, give it a go. And if you've got a blog of your own, publicise your "feed". For what it's worth, my feed is both traditional RSS and the newer, but at the moment less widely supported "Atom" format.