What is RSS?
You will no doubt have seen this three-letter acronym in the course of your internet surfing. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website.
RSS is a means of publicising updates from websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they could decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source.
The original idea of RSS came from Netscape, where their intention was to provide a means for users to customise their personal homepage to contain links to websites that interest them, similar to bookmarking websites.
The application of RSS to internet marketing was an unforeseen development to RSS technology developers. Since users are given the freedom to add RSS feeds to their aggregators, those who are interested in particular products and services available on the internet can now be notified real time. Marketing becomes more specific to interested people and not a hit-and-miss operation.
Those who intend to use RSS for marketing their products and services should consider linking up with email account providers, networking websites, websites of newspapers and television network websites for medium to big-scale companies. Small-time industries can also look into networking websites as well as personal blog websites and websites of clubs and organizations that would probably make use of their products or services.
Clearly, RSS is an innovation in information management on the worldwide web as well as online marketing. We can expect better RSS technology in the not-so-distant future as its popularity increases among users and website owners alike.
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