Steve Rubel (one of my newest favorite reads) has a very useful post on RSS Syndication Made Simple. It is one of the best and easiest to follow, descriptions of how to use RSS to find and read content of other bloggers and news sources.
Steve writes – ‘RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a new technology standard that enables any online publisher (corporate, blogger, media, etc.) to broadcast information onto the Internet in “feeds.” Users can elect to subscribe to as many feeds as they want and view them all at once or individually using one or more different RSS readers, or news aggregators. Such readers include high-end dedicated desktop software applications, mobile devices and increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. No matter which aggregator you choose, you get the same great benefits: 1) you are alerted to new content from your favorite sites as soon as it hits the web and 2) you can aggregate all your favorite sources of information together and peruse them on one page.’
95% of what I write in my blogs I find through RSS – following specific blogs and using news alerts targeting keywords that my blogs are interested in. Every morning I wake up to a fresh stock of starting points for my days research and postings.
Within minutes of a news article or blog post hitting the internet I can know about it and be posting a link, quote or comment on my own blog responding to what is happening.
So if you’re not using RSS to find content for your blog you’re probably giving yourself a whole heap of work that you don’t need to go through each day – head over to RSS Syndication Made Simple and take a load off!
