What Is RSS?
Putting RSS Feeds to Work
What do people lose by using RSS feeds?
How are RSS feeds created?
Additional Resources on RSS
About Yahoo! Pipes
About Google Documents

What Is RSS?

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication." The product of using RSS is often referred to as an RSS Feed. Just as HTML permits a web browser to display any website - RSS permits users to use a different software tool (usually called a 'Feed Reader') to read the content of many websites from ONE place. Instead of the user going to the websites - the website information comes to the user. RSS feeds are to web sites what TiVO and DVRs are to television. Instead of being at the mercy of the content creator's schedule, web users who use RSS feeds can dictate when they will read the content and how long they will save it.

The RSS acronym (or its associated little orange square more popular on blogs) is rapidly becoming ubiquitous and expected on a wide variety of websites. Blogs were early providers of RSS feeds - but they are now expected of traditional news outlets.

But the reach of RSS is already far beyond pure blogs and mainstream newspapers. The U.S. Department of State provides RSS feeds of videos by topic. The Federal Reserve Board just announced in December of 2006 their addition of RSS Feeds to their Data Download Program. The World Health Organization provides RSS feeds of disease outbreaks. Washington DC's Metro now provides a feed about Metrorail service disruptions.

Back when e-mail was new and unusual, people explained to one another how e-mail was a way to get messages in your computer - no real world mailbox needed. When the World Wide Web was new, before there were URLs printed on every water bottle and cereal box and before RSS, a patron of an online newspaper had to visit that newspaper's website every single day. Akin to go to the corner store every morning to buy a newspaper to read with morning coffee, a user would have to visit their chosen newspapers' websites every day. If the user didn't have time to read the paper - it would not be waiting for them tomorrow. There was no way to catch up on online newspaper reading after the fact.s

Enter RSS. RSS gives that online newspaper patron a way to subscribe-to request that certain kinds of articles from the online newspaper are delivered virtually. Just as an email inbox is a person's 'virtual mailbox' for delivery of electronic messages - a Feed Reader is that user's 'virtual doorstep' for the delivery of the articles from selected newspapers.

Imagine telling a group of foreign stock analysts that they could have just the Business Section of their local newspaper delivered to their virtual doorstep every morning. Now tell those analysts that they could have the Business Section of 20 newspapers from around the world delivered to them on that same virtual doorstep. Those articles that arrive through the RSS feeds will wait in those analysts' Feed Readers. The Feed Reader will keep track of what articles have been read. Most Feed Readers provide a method of earmarking and sharing articles of special interest.

An interesting side effect of subscribing to an already popular RSS feed is that most Feed Readers will automatically provide access to old articles from the feed as soon as you subscribe. While these articles will automatically be marked as read, they will still be available for you to examine and read at any time - but with no guarantee that any links provided within old articles will still work. You will, in a sense, be able to read the back issues of your feeds because someone down the street had a subscription a year ago.
 

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Putting RSS Feeds to Work

Before a user can start subscribing to RSS feeds, they have to pick a "Feed Reader." According to Feedburner.com, providers of tools for RSS feed publishers, the most popular Feed Readers in February of 2007 were Google Reader, MyYahoo! and Bloglines.com. All three of these are free and web based - requiring only registration for a free account before getting started.

To get started selecting RSS Feeds - the easiest first stop is any website a user visits on a regular basis. One must hunt is for the little orange boxes or for the tiny link labeled 'RSS' or 'RSS Feeds'. Blogs are very clear about the benefits of RSS to increasing their readership - so any blogs already on a user's regular circuit around the web are excellent candidates for being the first additions to a Feed Reader. Many mainstream news outlets include that RSS Feeds link at the very bottom of the page - so it can take an eagle eye to spot it on some websites.

When subscribing to an RSS feed there is no guarantee that everything seen on a website will be sent in the RSS feed for that site. It is always worthwhile to examine a new RSS feed to determine if what is delivered in the feed matches what is published on the source website. Often a single website will provide many different RSS feeds geared toward topical interests. It may take users some experimentation with subscribing to multiple RSS feeds from a single site to ensure that they are getting everything they want to receive.

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What do people lose by using RSS feeds?

They lose the 'feel' of the original source website. Reading the New York Times looks and feels a particular way (and the Times has worked hard to make sure that if you land on a NYT page - you know it). Pull those news stories into a Feed Reader and you lose that 'feel' - your articles boil down to just the pure informational content. Some RSS feeds only send the title of the article and require that you follow the link back to the originating website to read the article to avoid this disconnect, while others choose to deliver the full text of articles in the pursuit of the loyalty of RSS subscribers.

The possible uses of RSS feeds are endless. A frequent traveller might check out the RSS feed for World Travel Watch for information about world travel advisories. If that traveller is planning a trip to Asia from DC in August they might add an RSS feed from Kayak.com to watch for the best airfares.

RSS was created to help users decide what they want to show up on their virtual doorstep every day - filtered and selected based on personal interests.  The idea is that by using RSS users can stop the mad dash around every website that might have something worthwhile. The assumption has been that RSS savvy users can pick and choose what content they want to spend effort reading, have it delivered to their virtual doorstep and read that content when it suits their schedule with no fear of missing key information.

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How are RSS feeds created?

The nitty gritty details are beyond the scope of this article - but the very short version is that a file must be generated that includes the content of the feed (the titles of the articles, the content of the article and sometimes images) in a very specific format defined by the RSS standard in XML. That raw RSS encoded content is posted on the web like any other web page. When a Feed Reader asks for the content at the URL - it knows what to do with content in the RSS format.

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you tell your Feed Reader the URL to call in order to retrieve the RSS content. How frequently this content is requested depends on the specific software you use. Some Feed Readers request content on a regular basis (every 30 minutes for example), while others only retrieve updates when the content providers alert the Feed Readers that there has been an addition to the feed with a "ping." Entire separate online services have sprung up to make it easy to submit this 'I have new content' message to the centralized repositories of many Feed Readers at one time. One interesting aspect of this is that if 5,000 people subscribe to the same RSS feed using Google Reader, only one copy of that content must be retrieved from the original RSS feed source URL. After that, Google Reader can provide that same content to everyone using their service until it gets the notification that there is more content available for retrieval.

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Additional Resources on RSS:

General Information:
http://www.rssboard.org/
http://www.rssboard.org/rss-history
http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification
http://www.semiologic.com/resources/help-with-feeds/
http://cravingideas.blogs.com/backinskinnyjeans/2006/09/how_to_explain_.html

For web publishers (how to make RSS feeds):
http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/
http://www.make-rss-feeds.com/
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/feed101

For those looking to collaborate online:
http://www.wired.com/software/softwarereviews/news/2007/04/lavidagoogle

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About Yahoo! Pipes

On February 7th of 2007, Yahoo! announced a new hosted service called Yahoo Pipes. Quoting that announcement: "Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line."

Yahoo Pipes pipes provides a sleek drag and drop interface that permits users to select and connect elegant little software modules. Pipes lowers the bar to permit those not fluent in programming to experiment with mashups. A mashup is simply the use of multiple sources of content in such a way that something new and useful is created.

A very popular mashup is ChicagoCrime.org. The creators of this website created an automated way of collecting crime data as reported by the Chicago Police Department on the Citizen ICAM website. They then integrated the data with Google Maps to create a very compelling interactive experience.

Yahoo! Pipes currently provides ten types of modules:

	Sources - this is how you pull information in to work with.
	User Inputs - lets your pipe ask for information before it runs and then use that info as part of the processing
	Operators - this is a very geeky name for the modules that let users do things to your data. Some are very simple such as 'Sort', 'Unique' and 'Count'. A great deal of programming power is represented by a few of the more advanced modules. The 'Filter' module lets users permit or block items based on various rules. The 'Regex' module supports the use of Perl-style regular expressions to manipulate data.
	URL - lets you build a URL for use elsewhere in your pipe.
	String - supports manipulation of string values.
	Date - supports manipulation of date values.
	Location - supports work with location for pipes dealing with addresses, zip codes and maps.
	Number - supports manipulation of number values.
	Math - performs basic arithmetic functions.
	Pipes - any existing pipe can be used as a module in another pipe.
To give you an idea of the wide range of things people can do with these - here is a simple example:
	One person created a custom search for apartments with garages in San Francisco. He takes in a 'max rent' entry when you run the pipe - and he looks through craigslist and does all sorts of filtering and examination of the data before spitting out a tidy list of apartments with garages (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=AIIqPPy62xGhbzNCIBeTaQ)

Pipes is still beta (ie, not done yet), but as is often the case in the world of Internet time, it is taking off with lots of buzz and a fast growing community of Pipes Developers who help one another figure out the best ways to implement ideas and suggest ways to improve the tool itself.

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About Google Documents

Google Docs and Spreadsheets (often shortened to 'Google Docs') allows users to upload and create word processing documents and excel style spreadsheets. A free service from Google, Google Docs permits each registered user to store up to 1000 documents and 200 spreadsheets. Users can upload existing documents or download their Google Docs in various formats. Beyond being an online document editor, one of Google Docs' most powerful features is the option users have to share their work with multiple others in real-time.  The documents can be designated as “private” with others allowed in as collaborators (the collaborators can change the documents) or invited in as just viewers.  The documents can also be made public.

Google Docs also provides simple version control with an easy method of viewing and comparing past versions of the document. This comes in especially handy when multiple authors are changing the same document. To read about one person's experience with shifting to editing and storing their documents exclusively on the web - see this Wired article. Google Docs also has an online tour.

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Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, an MLS student at the University of Maryland, College Park, blogs regularly on SpellboundBlog.com about archival science, technology and the challenges of finding and preserving information in the digital age.