12.1 : RSS - What it is and what you can do with it
What is RSS?RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like CNN.com and blog sites. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a “Breaking News” feed from SEIU.org, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.
Why is it important?You may not know it yet, but you will need to have syndication capabilities on their site as another way to push your content out to their various audiences. From a press perspective, for example, many bloggers and reporters have noted that their use of RSS feeds enable them to stay on top of the latest news and events without having to spend time visiting hundreds of sites.
How do I access RSS?RSS/News Aggregators:Programs known as RSS feed readers or aggregators can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that they find. It is common to find RSS feeds on major news sites and blogs.
Blogs:Another way many people use RSS feeds is by incorporating content into blogs. Blogs are web pages comprised of usually short, frequently updated items and web links. Blogging as a publishing tool is used for many purposes: traditional journalism, personal journals, group discussions around a topic, and many combinations in-between.
What Can I do with RSS?RSS feeds by themselves don’t do much. If you view one in most browsers, you’ll see the raw XML, which is roughly human-readable, but intended for computer programs.
Displaying Headlines on Other Websites -- Quite a few websites use RSS to display headlines from other websites, as it provides additional content to their readers.
Search Engines -- RSS-based search engines can be quite useful; their big advantage is that they index individual items rather than pages which may contain many items.
RSS Aggregators -- Probably the most popular use for RSS is in RSS aggregators. Also known as newsreaders and news aggregators, these are dedicated programs which allow you to read RSS files.
Why Would Someone Use RSS? News -- To get the freshest news on current events, the country you are about to visit, or your favorite sports team, etc.
Hobby interests -- If you are a motorcyclist, a skier, a pottery enthusiast, a DJ, or perhaps a dog trainer, hundreds of conversations and bits of hobby advice can be fed directly to you.
Photos -- If you like to change your computer wallpaper daily, then RSS feeds are an excellent way to get the latest from photographers on the web.
Reading your friends' blogs -- If you have loved ones around the globe who do blogging, then you can have all their latest entries fed directly to you.
How it Works:1. You choose an RSS reader tool for yourself. Most RSS readers are free to use, and easy to learn. Here a list of some of the more popular RSS readers out there:
Bloglines (web-based): http://www.bloglines.com
Firefox Live Bookmarks (browser plug-in): http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox
Netvibes (web-based): http://www.netvibes.com
Newsgator (web-based): http://www.newsgator.com
Google Reader (web-based): http://www.google.com/reader
Safari RSS (built into browser): http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari
Opera RSS (built into browser): http://www.opera.com
Firefox Thunderbird (built into email application): http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird
2. Find a site that is serving RSS feeds – they will usually have this icon somewhere on the page:
Then you load the RSS feed into your reader tool by either clicking on the icon (at which point the reader may take over and load the feed) or copying/pasting the feed’s URL into the reader.
3. Now, you can start reading your RSS feed news! You simply log in to your RSS reader page, or start your RSS software, and you can scan all your web feeds instantly. You can arrange the RSS feeds into folders, just like email, and you can even set alerts and sounds for when a particular web feed is updated.
Here are some sites that you may be interested in pulling into either your personal RSS reader or your website:
Labor Sites
Andy Stern's blog
http://www.acountrythatworks.com/blog/4/feed
Institute of Industrial Relations Library Labor & Economic News Blog
http://iirl-labor-economic-news.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
Global Labor Strategies
http://laborstrategies.blogs.com/global_labor_strategies/rss.xml
Nathan Newman (http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/)
http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/index.xml
LabourStart (http://www.labourstart.org)
Top Stories: http://www.labourstart.org/rss/labourstart.xml
ActNOW Campaigns: http://www.labourstart.org/rss/actnow.xml
all LabourStart feeds: http://www.labourstart.org/rss/
General News Sites CNN
Politics: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_allpolitics.rss
Political Ticker: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_politicalticker.rss
Business: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/money_latest.rss
all CNN feeds: http://www.cnn.com/services/rss/
Washington Post
all feeds: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/rss/index.html
Google News
SEIU: http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn&q=seiu&ie=UTF-8&output=rss
How can you really use RSS?As creators of content with very limited time on your hands, the RSS feeds you create will save you hours of time in getting your content out into the hands of your audiences. Imagine adding your content once to the website and having it appear automagically in the in-boxes and RSS readers of your supporters or press. That is the promise that RSS holds, but just creating an RSS feed is not going to do the job. There are a few basic steps one should complete in order to get the basic pieces of an RSS strategy in place.
1. Ping!Once you’re RSS feed starts filling up with content, then you’re going to want to make sure that your feed is being picked up by the larger RSS search sites, such as Technorati (http://technorati.com) and Google. Fortunately, the Framework will take care of a lot of that for you. Whenever you add content that you have designated to be distributed via RSS, the system will “ping” several search engines, letting them know that you have added new content to your RSS feed. The search engines will, in turn, pull your RSS feed onto their sites. With that said, there are many, many, many RSS search engines out there, so if you stumble across something new, please feel free to add yourself to their service.
You may also want to add yourself a Blog/RSS Directory or two. Because Directories are managed by real people, small, and tend to be very niche, you will have to manually request that your site be added to their service. Directories may include:
Blogburst: http://www.blogburst.com/
BlogFlux: http://dir.blogflux.com/
We recommend you don’t spend too much time on Directories though – focus on the search engines.
2. Burn!The only problem with RSS feeds is that you can’t track metrics. In other words, you can’t see how many people are viewing your feed. Fortunately, people much smarter than you and I have figured out a solution to this problem. One such group launched a really cool application called FeedBurner (http://www.feedburner.com), which allows you to add your RSS feed to the service (it is not a search site), track activity on that feed (in order to do this, you have to use a link that Feedburner creates), create a newsletter sign-up tool for your site (which basically, emails your feed to a list of folks whenever you add content to your site), AND mashes up your feed by letting you pull in your Flickr images, del.icio.us/Digg links, calendar events (assuming you use Google Calendar or upcoming.org), etc. Whew! Good stuff – sign up for it.
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