RSS Feeds

RSS = Really Simple Syndication

RSS is used for a variety of different things, but is mainly used for streaming a news feed to the public.  Instead of visiting every single site, trying to catch up on news from every source, a person can use an RSS Aggregator which pulls in all the news feeds from each site he is subscribed to.  Some popular sites that aggregate these feeds are Google Reader and Yahoo Pipes.  Apple's Mail application also has an option to bring feeds in along with your email, so you can get all of your important information in one location.

RSS is formatted using XML to store its data.  Each line item is stored in an <item> tag with the following sub tags to store pieces of data about that particular item:

• <title> - The title of the article
• <link> - A link to where the article is located on the hosts' server
• <author> - The email address of the author
• <category> - Which type of categories the article relates to
• <pubDate> - Date that the article was published

References:

http://www.whatisrss.com/

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html#hrelementsOfLtitemgt