RSS
RSS – Really Simple Sindication or Rich Site Summary, and possibly some other variations, but what does it mean?
Well let me take you back a few years, when web sites were developed back in the 1990s many were put online, and information was spread from there… every now and then they were updated. Many news sites were frequently updated, and you could subscribe to their email list to gt regular updates.
Now we have blogs and wikis sharing information at an incredible rate, some can be updated hourly or more… how to keep track of them. The simple way to do it is through what is called RSS.
By clicking on this icon, you are generally taken to a link to subscribe to via your RSS reader, this way you can keep of track of any site updates when you want to.
The Feed Reader I use is Google reader, part of the Google set of products, so if you have a gmail account, or iGoogle page you will have access to Google reader. There are many others including Bloglines, Feed Burner etc, the one you use is up to you, but you really need to get one to stay on top of the information.
Here is a video created by Commoncraft to explain what RSS is, and how it works.
Some other resources to explain what RSS is are from Sue Waters – the Edublogger
Software Garden and What is RSS
The main things to remember are, RSS helps you to keep up to date with changing information of websites. Readers collect the changes to allow you to view them when you have time. In these times of information overload and time constraints RSS is a great way to to maximise your efforts.
