RSS

What is RSS, and why do you need to learn about it if you are learning about Web 2.0? Well, imagine a world filled with content producers: not just your traditional sites, like news and information, but now friends, colleagues, students, bloggers, etc. You could never find the time to bookmark their sites and then visit them regularly. But what if you could subscribe to the voices you wanted to hear? That is, what if you could go to a single site or use a single program that showed you all of the new content or information from the sites and people you were interested in? Well, you can. And RSS is the subscription method for doing this. You use a program called a "reader" or "aggregator," that can be compared to a newspaper--but where you choose whose writing and pictures fill the columns. This way you have one portal to all the information that is of interest to you.
 * RSS**

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication," and the information in an RSS subscription is called a "feed" (like a "newsfeed"). That feed can include just summary information or all of the content of a blog post or article. It can even include photographs, sound files, or video. Look for the little orange symbol that identifies an RSS feed. Click on it and you'll find that your web browser wants to do something with it!