What Is RSS: A guide to Real Simple Syndication benefits, best uses and applications

Takes better minds than me to explain RSS to lawyers. As part of my continuing efforts to find those better minds, I found an excellent guide to RSS and its benefits from Robin Good.

Among other things, Robin, with illustrations and videos, walks you through:

• An RSS overview – giving you the basic facts about RSS.
• Why RSS? – some reasons that you might find RSS useful in your everyday use of the web.
• Where to find RSS on a website and how you can subscribe to the content you enjoy most.
• The types of content that RSS can bring to your desktop or online “aggregator.”
• How to gather your RSS feeds using a Feed Reader or Podcatcher.

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• Creating News Radars and Linkblogs – how you can use RSS to gather content from all over the web and create hand-picked news radars of content as a resource for your site visitors.
• Creating an “ego radar”, a way of monitoring what people are saying about you and your content all over the web.
• Creating a lifestream – an aggregated collection of your online publishing, from Flickr photos, to blog posts, YouTube videos and Twitter tweets.
• Creating your own RSS feed – a simple way to make sure that people can syndicate and subscribe to your content.
• Submitting your feed to RSS directories – how you can maximize your web exposure by making use of the huge list of RSS directories gathered together by Robin Good.
• Feed scraping – how you can turn any website content into an RSS feed, even if it doesn’t supply a feed of its own.
• Filtering, merging and refining RSS feeds – how you can refine the information you receive from an RSS feed to suit your exact needs.

If you’re not a regular user of RSS already, read Robin’s full post. It’s a good one.