Just like in any typical community, internet community trends often define what is current and popular at the time. Shortly after the website boom of the 1990’s various website promotion related trends appeared. About as fast as they were developed, many were thrown out and forgot about. About the same time, a new type of technology was coming into play, known as RSS.

RSS actually stands for Really Simple Syndication. Surprisingly, RSS feeds have been around for over 10 years, but have never gained popularity until recently. The recent boom of internet blogging seemed to push RSS into the spotlight.

RSS allows a website owner to post news and information to their readers in the form of a title, short description, and a link to the full text. This can be accomplished a number of ways.

The easiest way to publish a RSS feed is through a blog. The majority of blogging software will automatically post a RSS feed for you once you submit your content to your blog. The only downside of this is the fact that you cannot control what information is posted in the RSS feed.

Once problems arose with the blog feeds, RSS publishing software was developed. This allows the website owner to enter the necessary information about their news (headline, link, and short description) and submit it. RSS publishing software can also be found online.

On the other hand, an RSS feed allows a website visitor to access daily information about their favorite websites without actually having to visit the website.  

A RSS feed is not spam, rather a way for frequent website visitors to view daily information. The most important feature, and perhaps one of the main reasons that RSS is becoming so popular, is because of the user gets to read the information they choose too. Instead of having to sort through hundreds of unsolicited messages, the user is able to read just the information that they want. If the user decides that they no longer what to receive the information posted to a specific RSS feed, they may opt-out and no longer receive any messages or information from that source.

While blogging is starting to show signs of a decline, RSS is actually becoming more popular. The main reason that RSS has yet to fade is that software super giants such as Microsoft has actually embraced RSS, making it a part of their new release of the popular internet browser, Internet Explorer. RSS will never replace E-mail, but sometime in the near future it will be some the same level.