In reaction to Chapter 9 of PR 2.0 – RSS Technology: A Really Simple Tool to Broaden Your Research. “RSS (originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.” – Wikipedia, A Definition of RSS.
More specifically, RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed's URI or by clicking a feed icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.
Before RSS came to our life, the news that we read daily is sorted into millions of newspapers, magazines, TV news, etc. The readers’ freedom is to select the media feed they are in favor of, not necessary contents. Now, RSS takes a step further: the readers now have freedom to have their own feed to access information. For example, I used to skip through the whole newspaper to read the news of my own interests, but now, with the RSS technology, I can subscribe and receive news of our favorite sections or topics. What’s more, in several RSS readers, i.e. Google Reader, you will be able to add star to certain articles. By doing this, the system will automatically re-rank the priority lists of news according to star system and recommend you the topics that related to the star one.
In addition to news reading, the RSS also can be used to fetch latest updates from our favorite websites as long as it supports RSS subscription. With this function, we will be able to receive latest news through one single RSS reader, instead of skipping through ten different websites. For my blogging project’s comment log part, I use Google Reader to subscribe to many leading PR and social media blogs, which are out of my interests. I don’t need to bookmark these sites into my bookmark bar on my website browser, instead, by opening my Google reader, I’m able to go through all the latest updates on my favorite sites. By scanning the updates, I can click those I would like to comment on and then leave my comments.
I believe RSS is a revolutionary invention for the information industry and will add values across all industries and client types. Especially, in an era with explosive amount of information communicated everyday, it helps people to cut down the information stream that they receive based on their own interests, simply simplifies our lives.
I found it very clever how you managed to integrate RSS feeds into doing this project, I wish I'd thought of that! It's such a shame that in a world that seems to currently be dominated by social media, the general public is pretty much solely focused on the mainstream sources such as Facebook and Twitter. RSS feeds are rarely even used. In fact, before taking this class, I would just ignore the little RSS symbol that is next to almost everything and anything on the internet. After this class, I'm definitely going to take more time into utilizing this tool.
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