The FeedZero Blog

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

It is a simple standard that allows content creators to provide updates to for their content or services. This information is then made publicly available to users via a ‘feed’, which they can subscribe to.

Subscribing to a feed takes place in some sort of software application (or another website like FeedZero, which is called an ‘aggregator’). Once you’ve subscribed to a feed, you can easily keep track of updates or changes to that website by simply watching new items come in to your application from the feed.

A typical example is a news website. An RSS feed on a news website might contain a summary of all the articles as well as a link back to the article. If you subscribed to the news feed, each time a new story was added, you’d be able to see it come in, instead of having to go to the web page to check again.

What are the advantages of using an RSS feed?

Going to a web page to see if there’s new content isn’t really that big a deal – so why should we even care about RSS feeds?

One of the main advantages is that as more people are coming online and more services are coming online, there’s just so much information flowing around that it is hard to keep track of. Even a casual user now might have many websites to check – news, sports, weather, technology, emails, social networks – the list goes on.

RSS feeds allow you to aggregate all of this incoming information into a central place. Instead of spending a lot of time checking a number of sites, you can just go to one place – your RSS aggregator – and read just about everything that is of interest to you. You can group it and categorize it so it is easier to sort through, and you can easily keep track of what you’ve read and what you haven’t.

How do I know when there’s an RSS feed available for a site I read regularly?

Look for this icon:

This is the standard RSS feed icon. If you see this anywhere on a page – usually in your browser bar somewhere, or just embedded in the page content – it means there’s an RSS feed available for content from this site.

What are the advantages of using something like FeedZero?

FeedZero is another aggregator. It is web-based and free, so its accessible from anywhere by anyone. There are a lot of other good web-based aggregators out there, and we encourage you to try them all to find one that suits you – but obviously we recommend using FeedZero!

But the big advantage of FeedZero is its filtering capabilities. A common problem that users have once they start using RSS feeds is “information overload” – you go on a subscription bender and add tens or hundreds of feeds, and all of a sudden you’re getting thousands of a new items a day – unless you’re prepared to devote hours of reading feeds, its just not really feasible to crunch all that information.

Enter FeedZero and Bayesian filtering. With some simple training – marking which articles you like, and which you don’t like – FeedZero “learns” what sort of items that it should show you, providing you with a nice concise list of things that you’ll find interesting.

It’s like a spam filter for the Internet, allowing you to better control what information makes it to you and what stuff gets left at the door.