RSS Feeds, The Conversation Continues

From Andy Sernovitz's "Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That" blog and to continue the post that I wrote last week about RSS Feeds:

Why are RSS Feeds so complicated?

Those of us in the social media business have done an awful job explaining them. We make it worse with a mishmash of terms for the exact same thing (RSS, XML, syndicate.) I think we should set an industry standard to just call them "feeds" and drop all the other terms, and use this symbol:

I had an really painful flight recently listening to a software engineer try to explain them to very nice, patient, and interested couple for 2 hours. (It didn't help he was trying to show them how it worked on his computer that was offline because we were on a plane. Grrr.)

The next day my dad asked me about them.

Here's my attempt at a clear answer to: "What are RSS Feeds?"

1. Many web sites publish updates whenever they have a new post or story. This is the "feed."
2. You can use a program called a "feed reader" to automatically collect all those stories so you can read them in one place. Think of it as an inbox for news.
3. It's quite handy--all your favorite stories come to you, instead of you having to go check a bunch of sites all the time looking for new stories. When there's something new, it shows up in your reader automatically.
4. There are also feeds for things like eBay searches or Craigslist posts. You could have your feed reader automatically track any new eBay listing for a particular item you are looking for.
5. You know if a web page has a feed if you see this icon: . It might also be near the top of your browser.
6. If you see these terms, they are all the same thing: RSS, XML, Syndicate This Site.

To get started:

1. Get a feed reader. My favorite is the free Google Reader. http://reader.google.com/
2. When you see the icon, click it to subscribe.
3. Start reading.

THANKS ANDY!

An RSS Tutorial for My KC Peeps

So you want to be on top of the bigBADbob? Well, who doesn't? But get your mind out of the gutter, we're talking about the BLOG here, people.

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It is a way to easily distribute blog updates to a wide number of people. From your perspective, you can be notified as soon as I write something new on my blog... which we all know is directly proportional to the amount of red wine that is currently circulating through my liver.

I'm gonna make a guess and assume that no one is ready for a feed reader tutorial and that no one is using Thunderbird as their email client. What did you say, BBB? Nevermind.

So, my RSS feed is as follows, you will need this for your email client:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/bigbadbob

If you are using Yahoo! Mail, follow these step-by-step instructions.
If you are using Hotmail, you're on your own... good luck with Microsoft help.
If you are using Gmail, follow these step-by-step instructions.

If you hear Sheneneh Jenkins in your head saying, "Ummmm mmmm, honey, no you didd-ent. I use my own feed reada," then shout out in a comment to the post since you probably don't need any help.