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.

RSS Day is an initiative that Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips began to help spread the word about the benefits of RSS.  [More information via on post] It’s extremely simple to participate in the project.  On May 1st, no matter what type of blog you have, as RSS benefits everyone, write a post about RSS, informing your readers about what the term stands for or how RSS feeds work.

Origins of the Initiative 

Even though most bloggers learn about feeds and subscriptions within the first week they start blogging, most occasional internet surfers have no idea what RSS is or what it does.

Since 2005, the amount of people using RSS aggregators or XML readers to get their news or used them on their websites only increased by about 1.4% while the amount of websites and users only increased tenfold. 

The main purpose of the project is to celebrate the many benefits of RSS and to inform the general public about its uses.

Daniel has created a website to simplify the process of informing people about RSS and includes several banners you can use to spread the word.

Promote RSS Day to Win!

There is also a contest to help spread the word, with over $3,000 in donation prizes available for winning.  By informing readers about the day, you will automatically be entered in (as long as your article is written by April 30th).  

Prizes are as follows:

• 5 $100 credit vouchers from Sponsored Reviews ($500)
• 6 $50 cash prizes via Paypal ($300)
• $250 in credits from FlashDen ($250)
• 1 year of free web hosting from Doreo ($100)
• 5 registrations with 10,000 credits on 125 Exchange ($100)
• 3 copies of Landing Page Optimization: The Complete Guide ($300)
• 3 packages with 100,000 impressions from BlogUpp! ($200)
• a 3-month enrollment to the SEOBook training program ($300)
• 3 single licenses to any iThemes Premium theme ($240)
• 3 $100 credit vouchers to buy links from TNX ($300)
• 5 copies of “Killer Domains: How to Find the Perfect Domain Name” ($100)
• 5 free banner designs from MiniBannersZen ($100)
• 3 single licenses to the Mimbo Pro Premium theme ($300)