What the Hell is RSS Anyway?

You may have seen some obscure references to RSS. Often an email newsletter will mention that it is also available via RSS, or you may see a link to the RSS page of a website. So what is it? And what does RSS stand for?

The short answer to the second question is, nobody seems to agree on what RSS stands for. Well, yes, the official definition is RDF Site Summary. RDF stands for Resource Description Framework. You don't really want to know what Resource Description Framework stands for, do you? If you really do, go to the RDF page on the official website of the World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org/rdf/).

The rest of the world says that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which, while perhaps less official, is certainly more meaningful to most of us out here in the real world.

Enough with the definitions already. What is it? Very simply, RSS is an information filter and retriever. Suppose you are interested in a specific type of product. For most popular products, you can usually find an industry website that reviews these products as they are announced by the manufacturers. At this point, you have two options:

1. You can remind yourself to look at that website every couple of days
2. If the website offers email notifications you can opt to get that notification in your Inbox.

You may be good at remembering to check various websites every couple of days, but most of us aren't. And many people are getting impatient with email -- there's just too much junk to wade through (but see our second subject below for a better way to handle the junk).

RSS solves both of these problems. If the website offers the option, you can set up a (generally free) subscription to specific columns in the website (new product reviews, for example) and your RSS reader will notify you when a new version of that column has been posted. The benefit to you is saved time. It's like having a personal clipping service that knows your personal preferences. You can change your preferences at any time, of course.

You can get a good perspective on RSS here: http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/. The best way to learn about RSS, however, is to get an RSS reader and try it for a while.

RSS Readers

RSS readers, sometimes called RSS aggregators, do for RSS what Outlook and Outlook Express do for email. They download and store RSS feeds until you are ready to look at them.

If you want to try RSS for no cost and with no system changes, go to http://www.newsgator.com and click on Newsgator Online. This is a free service that allows you to set up an RSS reader on their website. Of course, you have to remember to go to their website to check it, but it will give you an idea of what is available. Newsgator also provides an Outlook-based RSS reader, but it costs about $30 (this is a one-time cost, not a yearly subscription). If you live and work on Outlook, it's a nice way of including your RSS feeds on the same platform.

You can find a fairly comprehensive list of RSS readers here: http://email.about.com/od/rssreaderswin/, along with reviews of each one.

One caveat: RSS Readers (except for the ones that work through a website) require that the Microsoft .NET Framework be installed on your computer. Most people don't install this unless they have to because it takes about 36 MBytes of disk space. If you decide to download and install an RSS reader, you will first have to go to Windows Update to download and install the .NET Framework (it's an optional download but it's free), and then install the reader.

From a Website Owner's Perspective

If you have a website that changes frequently, either because you add new information or because your product line changes, setting up an RSS feed is worth considering. The same is true if you send out a regular newsletter. More people are discovering RSS and many come to prefer it over email.

If you run a corporate intranet, RSS has other interesting uses -- you can tailor announcements for specific audiences within the company. You can, for example, require all users of certain software to subscribe to an in-house RSS feed so they receive the latest announcements about that software and all the people who DON'T use that software aren't bothered with a junk announcements.

Of course, if you want to add RSS to your website, contact us.

New Antisp*m Utility

Note: Because many ISPs now have filters on their email servers, we are substituting an asterisk (*) for the "a" in the word "sp*m" in an effort to avoid getting caught in these filters.

We have been testing a new (to us, at least) antisp*m utility. It's called SafetyBar, but was formerly known as Sp*mNet, and it uses an interesting concept. Outwardly it works like any other Sp*m filter -- some of your email ends up in your Inbox and most of it ends up in the Sp*m folder. It's the underlying technology that's unusual. You may remember hearing an interview recently with a researcher who theorizes that a group will tend to make better decisions than any one individual member of the group. SafetyBar uses this theory to decide if an email should be put in the Inbox or the Sp*m folder.

It works like this: Every time you download email, SafetyBar moves all the messages it thinks are Sp*m to your Sp*m folder and leaves the rest in your Inbox. If you believe one of those remaining in the Inbox is Sp*m, you click on the SafetyBar Sp*m Block button. That sends information about that email to a server run by Cloudmark, SafetyBar's manufacturer. Cloudmark immediately distributes that information to all other SafetyBar users. Because millions of users are sending in information about many emails, and the same email is sent to millions of email users, a "crowd consensus" quickly develops about each email. In fact, "quickly" is usually measured in seconds, so unless you are among the very first to receive a Sp*m message, most such messages will go to the Sp*m folder with no action by you.

We've only been playing with this for about 24 hours, so we're not making any decisions or recommendations, but just on the basis of that 24 hours, we're impressed. In that time SafetyBar blocked 596 Sp*ms, allowed 14 Sp*ms to get into the Inbox (a false negative rate of 2.3%) and placed only one legitimate message into the Sp*m folder (a false positive rate of 0.16%). SafetyBar only works with Outlook and Outlook Express.

We'll play with this utility further and report on it next month.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.