The Power of RSS in the Online Publishing World

RSS basically enables users to receive new publications from multiple Web sources onto their computer. As to whether the original information is a Blog entry, news headline, press release or a podcast, with RSS the subscriber can receive the information in one standard format. The end user can subscribe to an RSS feed from the web page or various web pages of his choice (by simply clicking the RSS button). The RSS reader checks the subscribed feeds for new content regularly and automatically downloads any updates that it finds providing the subscriber with the feeds.

For end users, this means that RSS delivers the latest news onto their computers, making it possible to stay in touch with the huge amount of information available from all their favorite websites. The subscriber is in full control of setting filters to the content or which categories he wishes to receive. This saves time and there is no need any more for your morning routine of going through all your favorite websites. RSS enables you to get any content you want, whenever you want and how you want it. There is no need to give any personal details in order to subscribe to a RSS feed and therefore, RSS is also 100% SPAM free. If you wish to unsubscribe to the news feed, just hit the delete button in your RSS reader. Done!

Since major Internet Companies, such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are constantly implementing new RSS functionality and RSS tools, Media Companies are more and more open for using RSS. It is a growing source for subscribers, webmasters and publishers. Further, RSS works very much in favor of Online Publishers when it comes to Search Engine Optimization and traffic building. A simple copy and paste code of a sites feed makes it very easy for the webmaster to distribute the content which is a great way of getting incoming links to a website which automatically increases traffic.

Despite the overall advantages of RSS and its growing technical modifications and improvements, RSS has still a long way to go. RSS originally launched in 1999 and gained widespread use in 2005 but Online Publishers did not know how to promote it. Instead, they wanted the end user to go to their website in order to push advertising. The perception towards RSS is now slowly changing and an overall increase in popularity of RSS amongst the online publishing world and end users is on the rise.

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