Aug
Understanding RSS
I was in an excellent seminar recently that explained RSS. Here’s my interpretation of her explanation using TV analogies because that’s what the speaker used:
There are two parts to RSS, subscribing and syndicating. You syndicate so your readers can subscribe.
Syndicate is setting up the RSS feed on your site. I’m sure you’ve heard of TV shows being syndicated. Once a show has been syndicated, it’s able to be shown on many channels, not just the original one. It’s not exclusive anymore. Without RSS, your blog is exclusive to your readers who physically come to your site to see it. For TV shows it pays to remain exclusive because they sell advertising. The more popular the show, the more they can charge for advertising since there’s no competition between the channels, only the shows.
Now, you can sell advertising too through Google Adsense, but that may draw your readers away from your blog and onto other people’s websites which is not what you want. A closer type of advertising would be to become an affiliate and sell other people’s things that may also interest your target audience. Either way, you still don’t want to remain exclusive. You want as many readers as possible. Getting back to RSS…
When someone is on a website and they bookmark it, they have to physically go back there every time they want to view it. Plus, there is no way for your readers to know when you add new content. The advantage to RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) is that people are able to subscribe to the blog and they don’t have to actually go back there every time there’s an update. The new posts come to their reader the day they are posted. This means that you can’t be forgotten.
When someone subscribes to your blog, they click on your Orange “choose a reader” link. Their reader is the TV channel they choose to view it on. Choosing a reader is like choosing if you want to watch the show on channel 4 or 10. The only difference is that what they get is called a feed rather than a show.
I hope this helps someone understand RSS a little better.
