Blog Post #4: RSS is Really Simple Syndication.

I have been doing some reading on RSS in anticipation of my group's presentation at the next class meeting. Plenty is being written on the subject, much of it focusing on the difficulty inherent in explaining what RSS actually is. Unlike a wiki or a blog, RSS is a fairly abstract technology. Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head description: RSS is a "content delivery system." That word "content" seems to get used a lot in the Web 2.0 world. One blogger points out in a comment added to a post by Copyblogger that "content" is a very "industry specific" word (meaning the industry of the Internet). And so admittedly, "content delivery" is the sort of phrase that sets off alarm bells that ordinarily would warn me that someone is trying to sell me something. And language like that tends to make people zone out, even when used by the most charismatic of speakers. Some writers (a few of them genuinely trying to "sell" RSS to their readers) are using metaphors to try to describe what RSS does. "RSS is the delivery kid on the bike. An aggregator is the porch he throws your newspaper on." (Robert Bruce via the same Copyblogger post.) Or "Like sushi restaurant conveyor belts, [RSS] delivers content to people so they can easily pick what they want to read." (Jo Twist, BBC News science and technology reporter.) Both examples strike me as metaphors that are as abstract as the concept. So why is RSS so important to sell? Why should libraries be paying attention? Well, I have to leave something to say during the group presentation. But I like what Marshall Kirkpatrick recently wrote for the blog Techcrunch about RSS: "[It] is the foundation of almost everything Web 2.0 - isn’t it? It’s what makes blog readership scalable, podcasts subscribable, wiki changes watchable and so much more."