RSS Feed

RSS Feed or Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication.  RSS feeds are actually a collection of web-feed formats used to publish articles and posts from blogs or websites that can contain text, images, and video. These feeds can be full articles or summaries. Syndicating content automatically with a standardized XML file format allows for publication across many different programs.

Users subscribe to a RSS feed by clicking a feed icon or other link that provides the user’s browser or blog with the URL of the originating site and articles. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface, like a browser homepage, to monitor and read the feeds. RSS allows users to avoid manually inspecting all of the websites they are interested in, and instead have all new content pushed through to the user’s browser/news reader when it becomes available.

In December 2005, the Microsoft Internet Explorer team and Microsoft Outlook team announced on their blogs that they were adopting the orange square with white radio waves feed icon first used in the Mozilla Firefox browser. In February 2006, Opera Software followed suit. This effectively created and established this icon as the industry standard for RSS and Atom feeds, replacing the large variety of icons and text that had been used previously to identify syndication data.