What is RSS?
RSS is a Web content syndication format. The acronym ‘RSS’
underwent a number of meanings during its lifetime, but now is generally
referring to ‘really simple syndication’. RSS is a dialect of XML that was
created in the late 1990s to allow lists of information, known as ‘feeds’, to be
published by content producers and subscribed to by readers. The availability of
an RSS news feed usually is indicated in your browser by an RSS icon 
.
Very often, RSS news feeds are provided by news agencies or newspapers. For examples of news feeds, see
• http://www.nytimes.com/rss (New York Times),
• http://news.yahoo.com/rss (Yahoo!) or
• http://reuters.com/rss (Reuters).
An RSS file is a simple structured list of news items, each consisting of a headline, an abstract and a link to the full article, which are encoded in a way that they can be easily used by programs called ‘news aggregator’ or ‘news reader’. These programs allow users to read news or events from any number of aggregated news sites at one time.
Here are three examples of currently available news readers or aggregators which you may use to read the BSCW RSS news feed:
• Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/),
• FeedDemon (http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/) and
• FeedReader (http://feedreader.com/).
Current browsers incorporate RSS news readers so that you can directly read news feeds in your browser:
• FireFox 2.0 (http://www.firefox.com/),
• Safari 2.0 (http://www.apple.com/safari/),
• Opera 9.0 (http://www.opera.com/) and
• Internet Explorer 7.0 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/).
For more information on RSS, see
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss or http://rss.userland.com/.
For lists of RSS news aggregators, see
http://rss.userland.com/portals/
or
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/directory/5/aggregators.
Or check with your preferred Web search engine entering ‘RSS aggregator’.