Online Advertising Operations: RSS Readers

Isn't this icon familiar?

Online users these days frequently see something like this or wordings “Subscribe to RSS Feeds” on almost all websites and blogs. So, lets talk what’s the buzz about it

Everyone say, it is RSS, stands Really simple syndication in techies language an XML format

Initially I was one such victim who didn’t have any clue on how this logo help us and in what ways but I didn’t pay attention to it. when I frequently came across this, it provoked me to dig it. So I started digging to know what it is and what it is doing on all these websites, blogs, ………..

Readers, I won’t prefer to cover technical aspects of RSS, but rather I would explain everyone in a more basic internet users’s language.

Ok, let us imagine a service

Which automatically logs on to your favourite/interested websites, blogs,.. on our behalf and looking out for updates

Which would gather all the updates at one place making easy for us to read and organise

Which would also have utility options to send gathered contents as email, social bookmarking,..etc

All your above imaginations can be made live with the help of RSS. It is a service which would enable all the websites, blogs and anyother form on the internet which frequently changes its contents to update their users automatically.

How to make this service live?

We need the below two

RSS Feed URL of the websites/Blogs/……
RSS Readers/Aggregators

RSS Feed URL: These websites/blogs would program themselves which would generate RSS Feeds in a form of URL(E,g: http://rajaramachandran.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default), which is RSS Feed URL.Also we have separate software which would read our websites/blogs and generate RSS Feeds.

RSS Readers/Aggregators: It is a software where we can paste the RSS Feed URL, so this software begins to monitor the URL for changes and downloads the same to its storage space. Later on we can log on to the software and read.

Process Flow diagram

Yuk, resolution lacks.I spent time drawing so I won't give up.For clarity Click Here. This is a very very basic flow by which RSS contents are checked for updates and how it is read.

Few RSS Readers/Aggregators