RSS

Technology never ceases to amaze me…just when I thought I had a handle on the World Wide Web (oh yeah, no one uses that term any more)… excuse me the Internet… something new comes along that sends me back to square one (or should I say DOS). This time it's RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” ("Really Simple" who are they kidding...I could use one of those Dummies books right now… “RSS for Dummies”). As I understand it…RSS is a format being used to syndicate news, magazines and blogs. Web publishers distribute headlines, news links and story summaries using RSS. This is big time…major publishers such as the BBC, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal all use RSS. This new ”contain channel”, as it is called, allows the tracking of information updates using something called a “News Aggregator (If I was writing the Dummies book I would define News Aggregator on page one). RSS is also widely used by the Weblog community to share new entries. When a new blog entry is published or a news source is updated it immediately appears on your “newsreader”(just another word for News Aggregator…as defined on page one). There is no need to go hunting newspaper websites for a news story or dealing with “pop up Ads”…RSS sends only the important contains directly to you. The Middlesex North Blog is currently not available in the RSS format… but as you can see…the research has begun to add this feature (and I am already getting a headache). Stay tuned…aspirins please.