In fact, today’s media has become more revolutionized today. As of 2012, there were already more than 634 million sites running on the Web. According to another study, 72% of all Internet users are now active on social networks. Furthermore, there are hundreds of millions of blogs published on the Internet as of 2014. A significant number of these publishers and website owners have enabled RSS syndication on their respective sites. How does RSS work and how can an RSS aggregator help content creation? Let’s find out how.
RSS: A Brief Overview
Before we learn about RSS feeds and aggregators, we need to start understanding the basics of RSS. RSS is a term that stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Netscape first invented it when they needed something that would grab news and other data from other sites and automatically display it on their site. Later, a company called UserLand Software picked up the technology and developed it based on their understanding of the basic and original principles of RSS.
An RSS aggregator is used to compile automated content from third party Internet sites. Traditional RSS sourced content from news websites and blog posts. Years later, you can get RSS feeds based on keywords, tags, videos, images, and podcasts.
One of the most prominent RSS readers was Google Reader, but the company discontinued its services in July 2013. Since then, many websites have sprung up to absorb the site’s loyal users. Ideally, aggregation features are built into web portals, browsers, and email applications. At this time, mobile and desktop applications have also offered aggregation services.
What makes a good RSS aggregator?
A good RSS aggregator should be plain and simple. It shouldn’t be too complicated, especially for those who just want to have an organized reading list.
On the other hand, in case advanced users want to use RSS feeds on their website to deliver a series of content from another site, they should choose an RSS aggregator that has sophisticated features. For example, an RSS reader that simply posts all available feeds in a specific time period would look annoying on a website. Whereas, a good RSS tool should be able to schedule the feeds that are published on the site.
RSS can also be used to share your content with social networking sites. This is usually done by small and medium business owners who rely on social media marketing to keep people interested in their brand.
