Many of you while seeing this orange icon which denoted RSS must have tought:

what are RSS feeds?

RSS is a collection of web feed formats  which is  used to publish content which is
frequently updated such as blog entries,audio,video,news headlines in a standard format. An RSS document comprises of a fully summarized text  along with metadata.

Web feeds are useful for the users because they are constantly kept updated by the web feeds they have subscribed to as
well as the publishers because whatever content updated is immediately known to by the users.They can also be used to get feeds of several different websites  at one place thus saving time of the users.

The precondition for using an RSS also known as Really Simple Syndication is that we need to subscribe it before it can be used.The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo New,Indiatimes and many more.RSS feeds are read by using a software called RSS reader or News Aggragator which is web,mobile or desktop based.

The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URI or by clicking
a feed icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS
reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any
updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the
feeds.

Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content
and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many
sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a
feed is available.

RSS was developed around the year 1999 but it was between 2005 and 2006 when RSS
gained widespread use.

Ramanathan V. Guha
Ramanathan V. Guha

The basic idea of restructuring information about websites goes back to as early as 1995, when Ramanathan V. Guha and others in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group developed the Meta Content Framework.

The first version of RSS RDF Site Summary was developed by Guha at Netscape in March 1999 foruse on the My.Netscape.Com  portal,the version became known as RSS 0.9.

In July 1999, Dan Libby of Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91, which simplified the format by removing RDF elements and incorporating elements from Dave Winer’s scriptingNews syndication format renamed RSS as Rich Site Summary