RSS for Research and Fun   Tags: gdsj, ict_literacy, rss, scholarly_communication, scholarly_publishing, social_web  

To get you started, the tabs across the top of this guide provide a sampling of sites that offer RSS subscriptions to articles, podcasts, videofeeds, etc.

In addition, links to pages of websites that offer a variety of feeds for resources of interest are listed below:

A site that doesn't already have an RSS feed icon/link MAY still be able to be read by RSS Script, but you will need to use a service like Feedage or Feedity  to generate the RSS script for you.  Note that some older sites are written in code that will not allow an RSS script pull the information from the site. 

RSS is an acronym for Rich Site Summary, but it is often called Really Simple Syndication. RSS works as a type of subscription mechanism for web-based resources. Instead of visiting various different web-based resources, an RSS subscription allows stories, audio files or site changes to be delivered to a subscriber through a single interface. RSS also allows for distribution or re-distribution of information through social web resources.

This syndication mechanism effectively allows you to create a “newspaper” where you have chosen all the contributing news sources – whether text, audio or video.

• Educause: 7 things you should know about RSS
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• Quick tutorial: adding St. John's Library resource feeds to an iGoogle account.

Rich Site Summary is a handy way of “keeping up” with news, personal interest items and academic research; RSS-feeds can be found on many web-based resources, such as professional websites, research-databases (including search alerts), Journal Table of Contents, etc.

You can keep a personal collection of feeds, or aggregate a number of “reliable” feeds for your subject  for reserach or professional development activities.

Feeds are also normally “built-in” to wiki and blogging software.

While you don’t really need to know programming languages to use RSS effectively, the rough mechanics are as follows:  RSS feeds are summary-xml files that are generated by a web-publisher.  An RSS icon on the website (usually an orange button or RSS label within the text or by a search box) indicates that a user can subscribe to the site.  Clicking on the icon will give the user access to the website-feed-address, which the user adds to a RSS reader or RSS account.   An RSS reader displays all the most recent changes from various sites, and aggregates them into a single interface.

For more technical information, visit:  http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rssVersionHistory.html

What makes RSS an important part of the "Social Web"?