Jeff Bennett's Blog

The Internet has allowed all of us information junkies instant access to news and information from all over the globe. At first this required visiting the web sites that created this content. Of course the search engines allowed an index of this information but latency on the indexing process did not allow instant access to information that was changing quickly. Google through their Google News enhanced this in a big way as have many other aggregation points providing timely collection of information. These aggregation services have allowed the customization of sources and types of information, but still have fall short on offering a complete set of information across all sources you might want to track.

RSS (really simple syndication) has allowed us to in essence create our own truly customized aggregation services. RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blogs, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format. An RSS feed can include full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using RSS Readers that are available from Google and many other sources. The RSS Reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and allows the user to monitor and read, view or listen to the aggregated information.

The use of RSS provides instant syndication across the Internet for very targeted information. New media enthusiasts have embraced RSS as a very productive distribution path for growing access to their content. I can attest to the power of RSS as I am building an audience for my blog JeffBennett.Org as more and more of my readers are accessing my blog via RSS. As an information junkie myself, the Google Reader has become my home to track on information that is important to me from scores of sources that include news headlines and the favorite blogs that I follow. Most mainstream media has embraced partial access to information via RSS but has not allowed full text because they desire the audience to come to their sites to consume this content.

This past week The Guardian in the U.K. announced support of full text syndication for their content over RSS. In doing this The Guardian has become the “first major newspaper in the world” to offer its RSS content as full-text. At first glance you might think who cares right? This is a huge development with an old media company fully embracing the new model for syndication. The Guardian understands that it must get it’s content out to it’s audience in a manner that is appropriate for it’s readers. It will be interesting to watch who will follow The Guardian’s lead and how quickly. More old media companies must follow The Guardian’s leadership or they will become more marginalized as we all move forward. We all want to consume the content we desire in many forms as we just dont have the time to visit hundreds of web sites to get access to it.

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