RSS Awareness Day

Written on 1st May 2008                                                                                                              7 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

For those people who DO know what RSS is and use it it is hard to imagine that most people don’t. According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of RSS and less than 4% have knowingly used it.

Although I can imagine that most of our readers (with an interest in The Next Web) do know about RSS I still wanted to tell you about the phenomena since today is official RSS Awareness day.

According to WikiPedia “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.”

But maybe this video (titled “RSS in Plain English”) is more interesting to watch:

As you can see in the video, before you start subscribing to the RSS feeds of your favorite sites you will sign-up for (or download) a RSS reader. Try Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes.

Once you have your RSS reader working you can subscribe to RSS feeds by clicking the RSS icon on a website or in your browser url field. Most modern web browsers already identify RSS feeds, so you will be able to see the RSS icon. Don’t forget to subscribe to our feed!