May 1st is RSS Day

According to the Pew Internet Project in 2005 only 5% of Internet users said they were using RSS aggregators. In 2008 we’ve not seen much of an increase, which seems kind of crazy as once you get started, you begin to wonder why you bothered with all those bookmarks in the past.

DailyBlogTips.com came up with RSS Awareness Day to be held on May 1st. They’ve launched a new site RSSDay.org with more information and a cute video that clearly explains RSS in plain language.

I posted a bit about this a few weeks ago, but to recap: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a technology which allows people to receive automatic updates when new content is posted on blogs, news headlines, podcasts, or any website that publishes a feed.

In the past you’d bookmark a website and it’d be up to you to remember to check back to see if a blog has any new posts, or if a website’s been updated. With RSS it reverses the direction of information flow, so the blog or website will send you new content when they’ve been updated in what’s called an RSS reader, feed catcher, or news aggregator. Subscription is free, and there are many ways to subscribe.

The orange image on the left is a standard icon used to indicate that a feed is published by a website. Some browsers will show it in the address line, and clicking on it will give you the option to subscribe to the feed.

Plutonica.net has a feed for entries and another for comments posted to the blog – you can even subscribe through LiveJournal or via e-mail.

Subscription methods:

• Feed for Entries
• Feed for Comments
• LiveJournal Feed
• E-mail Feed
  
  Enter your e-mail address:

Are you aware of RSS readers and how they can simplify your browsing? Do you use an one, and if so, how many feeds to you subscribe to on average? (I only subscribe to a handful compared to many bloggers – only about 20.)

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Related posts:

1. Personal Update: “Magickal Retirement”
2. Notice regarding Plutonica.net RSS feeds
3. Plutonica.net upgrades and updates
4. What is RSS?
5. Schedule changes for Plutonica.net