"Real-Time Subscription Service" - An RSS Primer For You

I have been thinking for quite some time about how somehow RSS (Real Simple Syndication, a name which is completely unhelpful - and not real simple - to those who need help understanding it) has a serious image problem. I believe RSS is one of the the keys that open the door to the world of web 2.0, and if somehow it was as easy to explain as some of the other social technologies, that might change a great deal in terms of helping organizations get their feet wet in the social space. RSS is the bridge between the push and the pull, between your email inbox and the flow of information "out there".

Clear as mud? Right. OK - rewind.

What is RSS? See that orange square with the little signal symbol? Click on that, on any webpage it appears, and you can subscribe to that page. And what does that mean? It means you can get the information from that webpage sent to you, every time the page is updated. (More on that in a minute).

Also, it goes both ways - if you have an RSS feed set up on your website, you can send out information to any visitor who subscribes to you.

RSS should actually stand for "Real-time Subscription Service". That's what I think. That makes more sense! Because you're either subscribing, in order to receive new information as it happens, or you are offering a subscription, so your readers get your new info as it happens. All for free, of course, that's the beauty of it.

The pull of information to you - Subscribing

If you subscribe to a magazine or newspaper, it comes to your house or office. If you subscribe to an e-newsletter, it comes into your email inbox. If you subscribe to an RSS feed, it comes into a "reader". I think this is part of the problem with usability - there are waaaaay too many of these readers, often more sophisticated than necessary. I honestly don't know of any that are simple - some are easy, but that's not the same thing. You google "RSS readers" and you get "directories" listing hundreds of readers, or blog posts listing "top ten readers" - WTF? There should be some kind of basic standard one, plus techier versions with bells and whistles for people who like that sort of thing. Anyway. I am getting off topic. I have tried several readers, including the news feed that comes with Outlook, and right now I have settled on Google Reader. Start with that. Later on you can explore others.

So how do you know what to subscribe to? Well, all of us social media folk are always advocating to start by listening, right? So say you've set up a Google alert with a couple of relevant keywords, so you are now getting emails that tell you that a couple of blogs in particular are about your association's field of interest and are the ones to watch. Rather than continue getting those alerts every day in your inbox, since you know they will always be relevant, you go to those blogs and click on the orange button to subscribe - and you can now choose to subscribe in Google Reader, which is always one of the choices. Don't input your email address to subscribe, which you can usually do - you're goal is to move your subscriptions out of your Outlook or Entourage inbox and into your reader.

From now on, subscribing is easy. You can click on links in those blogs to other blogs on the same topic, or news sites, or whatever, and they will all appear in your Google Reader. And, on the home page of the reader, you will start to get suggestions for sites which might interest you, once you have a few in there to start with so the reader knows what topics you are looking at. There's also a nifty "discover" button, which compares what you are reading to what others "similar to you" are reading. (This explains how that works.)

Once you've subscribed to some feeds, you can go into "manage subscriptions" and organize them into folders, or tag them. There's also a little "subscribe" button under "goodies" which you can drag to your bookmarks bar in your web browser - so from then on when you are on any website with a feed, you just click on that to subscribe to it, (instead of having to go find the 'subscribe" button on that website).

The push of information to your readers - Offering a subscription

Every website with regularly updated content should offer an RSS feed. What this means, now from the "provider" point of view instead of the "subscriber" point of view, is that whenever your association's site or blog is updated, all your regular readers will get the new content delivered straight to them in their readers. Why is this important? Well, if you have a "latest news" section on your website, or you want people to read your association blog, then they need to know there's something new to read there without having to come look for it, and also without you having to email blast them to let them know - besides the fact that anyone can subscribe, which means you may now have a much wider reach than just your association's membership.

Again, there are probably several ways to do this, but the one I use, which I suspect is the standard-bearer, is Feedburner. Here's a good explanation of the basics from their site. I'll let you go there to figure out how to do it, but essentially you add some code to your site et voila. They offer, for free, lots and lots of things you can then do with your feeds, which they have organized under the self-explanatory sections "analyze", "publicize", "optimize", "monetize" and "troubleshootize".

There are, of course, many layers of things you can do with RSS, but I assume this is plenty to get you started.

Want more? Here's a tutorial on RSS - and here's the always fun Common Craft video on what it's all about.