Rss Feeds
What is an RSS Feed?
Check out the Wikipedia definition
See the article on RSS in WebReference
RSS stands for REally Simple Syndication - very basicly its a way of distributing news (broadly defined).
It enables content to be shared - principally among web sites. Most fo the major broadcasting companies (e.g. BBC, CNN) provide news feeds to web sites around the world.
This blog article discusses how RSS feeds can be introduced into web sites. A future article dicusses how web authors can create their own RSS feeds which can then be piped to other web sites.
Combining feeds together (from various sources) is called “aggregation” and the mechanisms for doing this are referred to as “RSS Aggregators”.
As the above quoted article in WebReference says, “RSS democratizes news distribution by making everyone a potential news provider.”
Bear in mind that “news” in this context does not necessarily refer to the stuff that newspapers turn out - it can be any form of written content, about anything.
There is an example of news feeds on the BBC News web site
As this article explains, news feeds enable someone to see when websites have added new content. It is possible therefore to receive information without having to go to a web site and read it.
Incoming news requires a “news reader”. The newsreader software shows the latest headlines and articles. So if you have a reader and what to get articles about a specific subject, you can subscribe to that subject (e.g. from the BBC feeds).
Web site authors can put news feeds on to their web sites. Usually this is free because publishers want people to add their feeds.