Today is RSS Awareness Day, an event that is intended to help spread the many benefits of using RSS and feeds to help anyone keep updated with their favorite sites or blogs.

RSS Day.org

RSS has become one of the leading tools for bloggers, although only a few percent of people who own websites or are active online know about it.

What is RSS?

In simplified terms, RSS is a type of feed format used online that allows publishers to frequently update and deliver their content (blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts) to readers and listeners. [from Wikipedia]

There is no code required to install or use RSS, as most modern blog software automatically includes code to utilize it.  However, if you take a look at the RSS string, with posts, you can see that more is going on behind the scenes than you think.
 

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The current version of RSS (2.0) stands for Really Simple Syndication.  Previous versions (1.0 and 0.90) stood for RDF Site Summary, and RSS 0.91 represented Rich Site Summary.

History

RSS started as a way to deliver information in 1995, when Ramanathan V. Guha and others in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group delivered the Meta Content Framework.  In 1999, the first version of RSS was created by Guha while working at Netscape, and its primary usage was on the personal Netscape.com portal, becoming known as RSS 0.9.  A new version was produced in 1999, called RSS 0.91, by Dan Libby of Netscape.  

The following six years brought some changes to RSS, an update to Version 1.0 and the creation of the Atom feed was begun in June 2003, as a way to ‘clean up’ the issues surrounding RSS.  Mozilla’s Firefox browser first began using the now widely accepted feed icon (orange with a circle and two bars, directed to the right) around 2005 when Microsoft Internet Explorer also began adopting it.  

How Bloggers and Readers Can Better Utilize Feeds

Feeds allow everyone to stay updated.  Let’s say you published a post at eight a.m.  Frequent readers may not know or realize that you published or updated your content.  With feeds (RSS and Atom), they can quickly check, within a fairly short period, and see that their feeds, and your website/blog were updated.  Before feeds, people had to manually go to each site or subscribe to a newsletter-type service, often more costly to both parties in time and money.

Many popular news sites serve feeds, and upon subscribing, you will immediately be alerted when a news story breaks, via your favorite feed reader.  There are several online choices, including Google Reader, and Bloglines.  NewsGator specializes in several feed reading services, both online and offline.

FeedBurner is a service that allows bloggers and publishers to keep track of their feeds and make the process of subscribing via different methods even easier.

Whenever you see the little icon in the address bar or a link on the site that says “Subscribe to Posts”, it typically means that you are going to be subscribing, and staying up-to-date with the content on the site via RSS or similar feed method.