""RSS" stands for Really Simple Syndication, Rich
Site Summary, and/or Rockdale, Sandow, and Southern (Railroad) (if
you trust the good folks at AcronymFinder.com).
Really Simple Syndication is probably the most widely agreed-upon choice.
As far as we are concerned, all three acronyms do an inadequate job of
describing what RSS actually is: RSS is a standard for publishing
regular updates to web-based content. Using this standard, Web
publishers provide updates, such as the latest news headlines or weblog
postings. Meanwhile, consumers use RSS reader applications (or one of
a growing number of online services) to collect and monitor their favorite
feeds in one place (RSS content from a publisher, viewed in one of these
readers, is often called a "feed").
Consumer Bottom Line: RSS makes reviewing a large number of sites in
a very short time possible."
From: Feedburner--About Syndication, RSS, and Other Web-Altering Chemicals
Examples of free, desktop, RSS readers:
Examples of free, web-based RSS readers:
The Mozilla Firefox browser
has an integrated RSS reader whose functionality goes by the name
Live Bookmarks.
A site is enabled for Live Bookmarks when you see this icon  on
the bottom right corner of the browser. Clicking on the icon and selecting an
RSS feed will bring up the Add Bookmark dialog. Select 'OK' and you will see
Live Bookmarks with the rest of your bookmarks. Many people find it especially
convenient to save Live Bookmarks in their Bookmarks Toolbar folder.
Some sites don't tell Firefox that they support Live Bookmarks, even though they
actually do. If you know the URL of a site's RSS feed (url ends with .rdf or
.xml), you can manually create a Live Bookmark for the site. Go to the Bookmarks
menu and select 'Manage Bookmarks'. Under the 'File Menu', select 'New Live Bookmark'.
Create a name for the Live Bookmark and add the URL. New articles from that site
will appear as Live Bookmarks in Firefox.
Other RSS readers, resources, and tools can be discovered at the RSS
Compendium.
How Might RSS Feeds Assist Your Research Endeavors?
Using an RSS reader to subscribe to RSS feeds from a growing number
of sources can save you time and make your research more efficient. Rather
than checking a number of web sites for new information, RSS feeds enable
you to go to one place, your RSS Reader, to find new content from each
of those sites.
- The EMU Library is starting out by publishing Library news announcements
as an RSS feed. So instead of checking the Library web home page to
scan these announcements, you can subscribe to our announcements RSS
feed and have the information come directly to your RSS reader. (The
URL to cut and paste into your RSS reader for the library news announcements
feed is: http://brand.emich.edu/rss/hallenews.xml .) During the Fall
Semester 2005 the Library hopes to create RSS feeds for new materials
we acquire, each feed for a differnt subject. You will be able to subscribe
to one or more of these feeds and have lists of our new books on subjects
of interest to you appear in your RSS reader.
- An increasing number of e-journal publishers and vendors are making
supplementary information -- titles of the most recent articles, abstracts,
and other related information -- available as RSS feeds. The University
of Saskatchewan Library provides a list of e-journals with RSS feeds:
http://library.usask.ca/ejournals/rss_feeds.php
- ProQuest, the creator of the ABI/INFORM database of business and
management articles, has created a number of RSS feeds that alert subscribers
when new articles are added to the database that deal with specific
topics. For example, under the broad topic of International Business,
you could subscribe to individual feeds that deal with such themes
as Communications in global business, Emerging markets, Global & international
marketing, Global staffing, Intercultural management, International
business strategy, and International finance. Links to these feed are
located at:
http://www.proquest.com/proquest/rss/rss.shtml
- PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine(NLM), includes
over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's.
You can now perform a subject search in the PubMed database and generate
a custom RSS feed based on your search. You can then paste the feed
address into your RSS reader and have current awareness search updates
sent directly to your RSS reader. Simple instructions are available
from the NLM:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/mj05/mj05_rss.html
- FirstGov.gov, the U.S. government's official web portal, has set
up a number of RSS feeds that reflect news and information about different
subjects that appear on offical government web sites. Examples of RSS
feeds include those from the Department of Education, the Census Bureau,
the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administratrion.
The U.S. government RSS feed link library is located at:
http://firstgov.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Libraries/RSS_Library.shtml
- MSN Search offers RSS feeds
for your search results. Run a search in MSN Search (either web or
news), click the RSS link (
 )
at the bottom of the search results page, and then
copy the web address (URL) for the page and paste it into your RSS reader.
After you subscribe to an RSS feed of your MSN Search results, your
RSS reader will regularly go to MSN Search to get the most recent top
ten results for this query. As the top results change, your RSS reader will post
the updates.
You can subscribe to any number of RSS feeds of MSN Search results and
view them all in your RSS Reader without re-running your search queries.
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