RSS provides automatic updates from favourite sites and sources, Angus Kidman learns.

Published in The Bulletin, October 1 2003

What do you do when you want to get information out, fast? A web site helps but for education.au, which runs EdNA, a network for Australian educators, a web site wasn't quite good enough. So it has opted for a new technology called RSS.

"RSS provides the capacity to enable EdNA Online to provide its free services to other education and training portals," says education.au director Gary Putland. Half-a-dozen organisations that rely on EdNA are already using the service to build their own online news feeds, utilising resources collated by EdNA.

They're not alone. RSS -- which, depending on who you ask, stands for either Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary -- has been evolving as a standard since 1999 but appears to have reached critical mass recently.

Dozens of RSS "readers", which provide automatic updates from favourite sites and sources on a schedule set by the user, are available (check out http://rss.lockergnome.com for a useful list). Many popular "blogging" tools, used by individuals to list amusing links and random thoughts, automatically create RSS feeds. The result? Instead of checking your favourite sites every day, they let you know when something interesting has happened.

For individual users, RSS is a neat way to keep up. Still, its biggest benefit may be for organisations such as EdNA, which needs to share content with other sites, rather than people.

That doesn't mean success is assured. Too many current RSS feeds are about how great RSS is, and many others have a decidedly technical bent. Earlier attempts to create automated feeds using "push" technology in the late 1990s enjoyed limited success; one advantage RSS has in this area is that the standard itself is free for anyone to use, and many tools are available to help build feeds.

It's still conceivable that RSS could end up like Linux: popular with geeks but irrelevant to everyone else. However, if RSS support is added to popular browsers and email programs, it could become as essential as HTML, the language used to create web sites.