A friend asked me what is RSS.
What a simple question! I’ve syndicated hundreds of feeds throughBloglines and those are RSS. I have my blogs, my 43things, my wiki, andthose are all RSS. The orange RSS icons stand on every page of the web.What they demand, as all the other web elements do, is only some clicks.
However, I found little to answer my friend. I told him RSS equals toReal Simple Syndication, with which we can check out all the news ondemand without typing the web addresses in the browser respectively. Heconfused, I continued to teach: when you have many blogs to read, it isvery boring to going to each site.
“But we have bookmarks.” he responsed.
“Well, you know, not all the blogs update everyday. Bookmarks cannot tell you which blog has new entry. But RSS can.” I replied.
“But we have newsletter in mailbox.”
“Spam sucks.”
“But RSS could have spams too.”
“…”
Wecame back to room. He opened Maxthon, the IE-based browser whichclaimed to support RSS in a recent update. “So that’s it, RSS.” hepointed the orange icon on the screen and clicked it. Some XML symbolscame out. “What’s this!” The boy was scared.
I have to explain more.
Is it Real simple?