RSS Aggregators and Sharing Fresh Content

Today’s media has indeed become more revolutionized today. As of 2012, there were already over 634 million sites running on the Web. According to another study, 72{6fed281ec7a8abc92e2b781741b2370631fe85beacf5ac69d09adc3c180ad946} of all Internet users are now active on social media. In addition, there are hundreds of millions of blogs published on the Internet as of 2014. A significant number of these publishers and website owners have enabled RSS syndication on their respective sites. How does RSS work and how can an RSS aggregator help content building? Let’s find out how.

RSS: A Brief Background

Before learning about RSS feeds and aggregators, we need to start on understanding the basics of RSS. RSS is a term which means Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It was first invented by Netscape when they needed something that catches news stories and other pieces of information from other sites and have them automatically shown on their site. Later on, a company called UserLand Software picked up the technology and developed it based on their understanding on the basic and original principles of RSS.

An RSS aggregator is used to compile the automated content from third-party Internet sites. The traditional RSS got content from news websites and blog posts. Years later, you can obtain RSS feeds based on keywords, tags, videos, pictures and podcasts.

One of the most prominent RSS readers was Google Reader but the company discontinued their services on July 2013. Since then, many websites have emerged to absorb the loyal users of the site. Ideally, aggregation features are built into web portals, browsers and email applications. Right now, desktop and mobile applications have also offered aggregation services.

What makes a good RSS aggregator?

A good RSS aggregator should be plain and simple. It should not be very complicated, especially for those who simply want to have an organized reading list.

On the other hand, in case advanced users would want to use RSS feeds on their website to deliver a series of content from other site, they should choose an RSS aggregator that has sophisticated features. For instance, an RSS reader that simply posts all available feeds on one specific time frame would look to annoying on a website. Whereas, a good RSS tool should be able to schedule the feeds that are published on the site.

RSS can also be used in sharing your content with social networking sites. This is usually done by small and medium business owners who rely on social media marketing to keep people interested in their brand.