I've talked to several groups of student or professional communicators and I'm amazed at how few of them know anything about RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a tool that enables users to easily subscribe to and read or track content on web sites or blogs without having to "surf" (bop around from site to site to see everything that's out there). RSS is revolutionizing the way a message gets moved out there, and professional message movers aren't clueing in for the most part.
Simply put, instead of having to go to your favorite websites or blogs to see if anything new has been posted, you check your "RSS aggregator" which pulls in the RSS feeds to which you are subscribed.
If you're a content publisher, this is big news! RSS also allows you to distribute content to a host of sites that may subscribe to your site's content. This may make "hit counters" look less impressive, but the point is to spread the word rather than collective traffic statistics--right?
Try it out for yourself. Go download a news aggregator (also known as RSS Reader), such as www.newsgator.com, www.pluck.com, and www.feedster.com.
I'm going to get back to RSS in a later post (how you can use it for internal and external communications). Just spend some time experiencing it, and then let's reconnect on it.
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