RSS is an underused and underappreciated technology by a majority of internet users. There is a small minority who are just starting to appreciate the benefits RSS can have on there personal and business lives. It is hard to define RSS, you cannot really get it until you see it in action.

The primary use for RSS is content syndication, but this can realise itself in many different uses. The most popular use for RSS is as syndication format for blogs, blogs and RSS are very closely aligned as RSS feeds are a built in option for most if not all blogging software. Due to its close integration with blogs and the ease with which you can make a feed available on your blog means many blogs have RSS feeds. Blogs offer the content from their site in RSS format. Search is also becoming a popular use for RSS, take a look at Yahoo. Type in any search at Yahoo and you will return the top 10 results, you can now subscribe to the feed for that search. Admittedly they don't make it obvious but if you look in the bottom right of your Firefox browser you will see an orange button. The orange button shows that an RSS feed is available on this page, subscribe to it and you have constantly updating results for your search.

Social bookmarking, the newer and more trendy brother of traditional search also makes use of RSS. If you take a look at del.icio.us you will see at the bottom of every results page is an RSS link to subscribe to the feed for that tag. You can subscribe to tags relating to your interest to keep abreast of what is new and recently happening or popular. This is useful as you can get results quicker than they appear in the traditional search engines.

It is not just search and blog syndication that are benefiting from RSS. What if you need to keep a look out for new content for your site without having to constantly trawl the internet. With an RSS feed subscription at ezinearticles for any specific topic you can be made aware of new articles as they are added. This is useful not just for new content but also as a research tool for you area of interest.

I have covered only a few example of how RSS is being used now and how it can benefit you by having content from various sources delivered to your RSS feed aggregator. Imagine how much time you would save in having to search this content out. Conversely for the RSS publisher they have a contented subscription base of users who they may not have been able to attract previously without making it so easy to digest their content.

Allan is the webamster of a site about RSS, an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.