Why Is RSS So Popular Amongst Internet Users and Online Marketers?

RSS feeds are growing in popularity amongst both internet users seeking information about their interests, and amonst marketers seeking to build relationships with their potential customers. This article outline why this is happening, and where you can find out more about RSS feeds.

(PRWEB) September 23, 2004 -- If you haven't heard of RSS feeds, then you're missing out one of the most exciting trends in internet usage today. RSS feeds are a growing - and important - tool in the arsenal available to companies and individuals that are seeking to market their site, AND a great resource for people interested in reading about their hobbies, interests, professional skills, and news items.

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication", and forms a standard method of sharing information about updates to a site. Initially, RSS was used to share information about new content on a website, including a title, short description of the article or page, and the URL of the new content. People who visit the site can then use software (available free in most cases), known as an RSS reader, to read those updates on their PC, or via a web browser, without having to give away their email address.

Recently, the use of RSS feeds has begun to explode. They are used for news items, product announcements, personal diaries (or blogs), corporate diaries, and much, much more. The reason that RSS is also starting to take off amongst marketers seeking to promote their site, is because RSS subscribers don't need so share their email address or any other personal details. This makes it more likely that people will subscribe to your RSS feed if they are nervous about joining your mailing list. The RSS subscriber knows that they won't receive any spam (since they don't share their email address), and they can unsubscribe from the feed at any time (they just delete the URL of the feed from the software they are using to read the feeds).

As a counter-point to this, if you are promoting your site, you know that your feed updates won't get deleted by the growing number of email-filtering software in place on people's desktop and in their ISP. Which means you can guarantee that anyone who subscribes to that feed will receive your announcement, and that they are a interested enough in your news that they actively seek to read your feed.

And as RSS is a new technology, almost daily there are new uses of the underlying tools. You can produce RSS feeds to alert you of new emails, to share your recently-played MP3s, to share your wishlist at Amazon.com. You can include RSS feeds in your website pages, ensuring that the page updates each time that the feed is updated, giving your site regular updates without you having to do anything. And that helps your positioning in some of the major search engines, since they like regular updates.

So RSS is a growing trend online, both for subscribers and for people promoting their product, service, or website. And as with all new technologies, it's a rapidly changing arena. To keep up to date with the changes, visit http://www.allaboutrss.com for an all-in-one resource on RSS. There you'll find many resources for using RSS feeds: how to read them, how to create them, new ways they are being used, and more. And yes, there is an RSS feed to which you can subscribe, to receive new information about RSS resources.

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