Blogs, Feeds and RSS

The first thing to get clear is that Blogs, Feeds and RSS are not all the same thing.  As this new technology has emerged, their use has merged to the point where they have become interchangeable.  This Guide aims to clear up the differences between these terms and hopefully help you decide how you might use them.

In short, Blogs are a style of writing, similar to that of a diary; Feeds are a way to publish that content and RSS is a method to retrieve the content.

Blogs & Feeds

A blog (short for Weblog) is like a journal or diary, where your thoughts for the day and general snippets of gossip and information are stored.  However, instead of scribbling this in a little book, bloggers tap their keyboards.  When a new blog item is keyed, it is stored on-line by a blogging service.  The new phenomenon that has taken off lies in the ability for others to then view those blog entries.  But, why would you want to?  Why would you care what some spotty 15yr old Goth in Slough is depressed about today?

Some blogs read just like a diary - "Got up.  Raining.  Fed the cat, then watched TV" - and it's true that these have a limited audience.  However, the real power of blogging became apparent when people started to use this new means of distribution to publish items on a single subject, or a specialised topic.  Blogs started to appear where some guy would writes reviews of the movies he'd seen, or the restaurant he'd just eaten in.  When the movie reviews are being written by someone who works as a movie projectionist - who sees all the new releases on (if not before) their release dates - you suddenly have something that's worth reading.

At this point, what we're describing has gone beyond the term "blogging".  While the same tools are being used to write up and publish the items, they no longer read like a diary.  Blogs have evolved, and need a less-specific name: Feeds.

It's easy to see how the two names became interchangeable, as blogging was already the term being used by most people, and many of the services that had sprung up were based on the "blog" name, and they were hardly going to go register new domains and totally re-brand their sites.

RSS

Now that we have a bazillion feeds available, we need a means to read them and this is where RSS comes in.

Once again we find that "RSS" has become a catch-all name for what is in fact a number of different underlying technologies, but this time it's ok because most of these technologies, transports and protocols are beyond the scope of most users.  Most users won't care what specific XML sub-schema of RSS the feed they are being offered uses and the implications of each... they just care about a feed to which they'd like to "subscribe".

RSS has become the aspect of feeds that is presented to the user.  RSS even has it's own branding, in the form of this icon: , which confusingly doesn't say "RSS".

Feed Readers

In order to read a Feed, we need a Feed Reader.  A reader is used to "pull" the feeds using RSS and present them to you in a readable format.  Readers also organise the content for you and notify you when new content is available on the feeds to which you are subscribed.

At this point, we should cover the real reason that Feeds and RSS are so revolutionary, because it is the readers that have truely kick-started the whole phenomenon.  They did this by allowing feeds to replace a number of other existing ways in which we use the Web and receive information.  Do not underestimate how important this change is, because I believe it is as important as the evolution of the Web itself...  As the Internet grew from it's birth in the 1960s, it became too huge and popular for it's own good.  There was so much information, that it became combersome and daunting to navigate.  What was needed was a front-end to all this information, and the solution came in the form of protocols and formats that evolved into the Web as we know it.  The Web needed a user interface, and the Browser was born.  For a time, it was good... users were able to "surf" the Web and click from link-to-link with ease.  However, as the Web exploded in popularity people were faced with such vast numbers of potential links to follow that once again they became overloaded with information.  The solution came in the form of Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Take this information overload syndrome, and apply it to your daily surfing habits.  Many people are finding themselves overwhelmed by the amount of information they are trying to cram in daily.  The crazy thing is, they want the information.  I'm not talking about people being spammed and bombarded with pop-ups; I'm talking about people who simply want to read the news daily and maybe read a daily joke or two.

Actually, News sites are a good example and I'll use the BBC News site to illustrate this...  The front page of the BBC News site has a vast number of news stories divided into various sub-categories.  These stories are added-to all day, every day which causes older stories to drop off the front page down to sub-sections.  As a new story comes in, it might be of such importance that it takes the main article position at the top, which causes the previous article to move elsewhere on the page.

Arriving at the front page of the BBC News site gives you an instant overview of what is going on in the World at that particular moment and the past few hours.  If you visit the site multiple times per day, stories will have displaced each other, and you must determine what's new since you last visitted.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to view "What's new since I was last here?".  RSS allows you to do this, and the BBC publish a comprehensive selection of feeds for their content.

RSS has also replaced Email as a means of distribution for some content, specifically for newsletters and other regular or reoccuring mail messages.  Part of the problem for some newsletters was, they were constantly battling to try and distinguish themselves from spam, and losing.  Many newsletter publishers were finding they were unable to continue because their content was being tagged as spam and denied access to their subscribers inboxes.  They needed a new means to distribute their content, and RSS provided the solution.

How do I use a Feed Reader?

The first thing you need to do is go download a reader, and you'll find that they are available for every platform.  It doesn't matter if you run Windows, Linux or MacOS