Once when I was in college, I was telling my friend about this interesting web comic I had started reading. Cool, she had told me, I will add it to my comic rss feed! Rss feed? I did not know what she was talking about, and it would be a while until I understood how an RSS feed worked, and what it is useful for.

RSS stands for rich site summary, and it is basically a web feed service used to publish frequently updated works in a singular, standardized format. This allows the user to control where and when they view their information. For example, say you regularly read five different web comics, but they all update at different times throughout the week, and on different websites. Rather than having to memorize multiple schedules, or look up these websites every single day to check, you can instead enter their urls into your web comic rss feed. This way, all you have to do is look at your rss feed, and it will automatically tell you when each comic has updated.

Rss feeds are especially popular for websites that need to display updated news on a constant and consistent basis. News rss feeds are useful because they automate a process that would otherwise require someone to be doing by hand. It allows for the news to be displayed the moment it updates, since rss news feeds automatically syndicate themselves. Many popular websites also use a news rss feed in order to display what the most popular or recent articles and blogs are among their combined content aggregation.

News rss feeds are interesting because they change our perception of how quickly we can receive the latest news. Instead of expecting it to be accurate within the day, like a newspaper, or accurate within the hour, like a newscast, news rss feeds allow us to experience news as closely as we can to the event itself.