Feed What? An RSS?

As the popularity of blogs grew, so did the popularity of another technology,
called a feed or RSS feed. Both of these terms refer to the same thing. Feeds
are content that is pushed out to registered users who have signed up to
receive them. The content that’s pushed out can be short teasers about blog
posts, news, or podcasts or it can be a complete blog post, news item, or
article.
Podcasts can’t be pushed out through RSS, but you can send a teaser or blurb
about the podcast. (And, if you think podcasts have something to do with the
pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, have I got news for you: A podcast
is actually an audio recording that’s available to listen to online. It’s
an audio version of an article, news story, or blog post.)
Pushing content
Think of feeds like the ticker tapes that were used to transmit breaking news
into newsrooms around the world back in the 1940s and ’50s. Only this ticker
tape is faster, produces less waste, and is written in complete sentences.
The technology is different, but the result is the same — news is shared as
soon as it’s created. Now, I can hear you grumbling that blogs aren’t news.
Blog usually are news to someone. Does that mean that what you’ll find in a
blog is going to appear on the 6:00 news or as headlines in tomorrow’s newspaper?
Not usually. But for every blog out there, there is a host of people who
read the blog and want to know when a new post goes up. To those people,
those posts are news, and they wouldn’t mind at all if news was updated in
the timeliest fashion possible.
Because blogs have become so important in communicating in today’s
Internet-centric world, people often read multiple blogs every day. I know
people who subscribe to feeds for a dozen or more blogs every day. The
blogs vary — some like news, some like blogs in a particular niche area,
and some just like the stories about other people’s lives. Whatever draws a
person, there is usually more than one blog for them to keep up with, and
that’s where feeds come in.
Despite what you may have heard, RSS doesn’t stand for Really Simple Stupid.
It actually stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a protocol by which
content is delivered to a user who can read the content using an RSS reader or
feed reader — programs that display the content pushed out in RSS or feeds.
This content may be a small snippet — up to about 250 words — or it may be
the whole article. The person who sets up the feed determines how much text
is delivered to the reader.
Reading content
I’ve tied RSS feeds into the bloggy part of the Internet, but I have to be a bit
careful here. Accessing blogs is a no-brainer — you fire up your browser,
point it to the correct URL, and start reading away. RSS feeds are a bit different
in that, as I mention earlier, you need a special software program — an
RSS reader or feed reader — in order to access RSS feeds.
Not that it’s at all hard to find a feed reader. Examples abound, including
a Google variant (of course!) known as the Google Reader (www.google.
com/reader) as well as Feedreader, a neat little product available at www.
feedreader.com. I’m not talking rocket science here. All you need is a relatively
simple software program that’s been programmed to collect content
from various feed-enabled sources.
Using programs like Google Reader or Feedreader is usually pretty simple. You
begin with the application, which provides you with the “window” for reading
the selected content. To add content to the program, you usually just have to
enter a URL. The program then goes out and gets new content either on a schedule
that you set or in real-time. For example, if you’re using the feed reader that’s
built in to Outlook 2007, when you check your e-mail — or whenever Outlook is
scheduled to download your mail — your feeds are also automatically updated.
New feeds are updated in the Feed Display folder, just like new e-mails.
If you’re using a program like Google Reader, the feeds are collected on a
Web site. You log in to the site to see a listing of all the available posts — that
listing is automatically updated each time someone posts a new item to the
feed to which you’re subscribed.
The AdSense connection
You might be saying to yourself “Self, this is truly fascinating stuff, but where
does AdSense fit in to all this?” Wonder no longer. AdSense, in its infinite
wisdom, is working on software that would place AdSense ads directly into
the RSS feeds that are pushed out to subscribers. The idea here is that even
though you have content that’s pushed out to readers, you can still monetize
that content with ads. This is an especially valuable concept for Web site
owners out there who provide complete content in feeds.
Often, a Web site (or blog) owner will only syndicate a small portion of his content,
specifically because doing so forces the readers to come to the Web site
to finish reading the content, which increases the chances that those readers
will click any ads that are shown on the site. Pushing your ads out with your
content gives you one more opportunity to get ads in front of readers.