Takes better minds than me to explain RSS to lawyers. As part of my continuing efforts to find those better minds, I found an excellent guide to RSS and its benefits from Robin Good.
Among other things, Robin, with illustrations and videos, walks you through:
- An RSS overview – giving you the basic facts about RSS.
- Why RSS? – some reasons that you might find RSS useful in your everyday use of the web.
- Where to find RSS on a website and how you can subscribe to the content you enjoy most.
- The types of content that RSS can bring to your desktop or online “aggregator.”
- How to gather your RSS feeds using a Feed Reader or Podcatcher.
- Creating News Radars and Linkblogs – how you can use RSS to gather content from all over the web and create hand-picked news radars of content as a resource for your site visitors.
- Creating an “ego radar”, a way of monitoring what people are saying about you and your content all over the web.
- Creating a lifestream – an aggregated collection of your online publishing, from Flickr photos, to blog posts, YouTube videos and Twitter tweets.
- Creating your own RSS feed – a simple way to make sure that people can syndicate and subscribe to your content.
- Submitting your feed to RSS directories – how you can maximize your web exposure by making use of the huge list of RSS directories gathered together by Robin Good.
- Feed scraping – how you can turn any website content into an RSS feed, even if it doesn’t supply a feed of its own.
- Filtering, merging and refining RSS feeds – how you can refine the information you receive from an RSS feed to suit your exact needs.
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If you’re not a regular user of RSS already, read Robin’s full post. It’s a good one.