If you are not yet full from all the information being fed to you over the internet these days, try a Really Simple Syndication, or RSS as it is commonly known as. The syndicate is a way for you to subscribe to a certain web page, blog, or any site that is constantly updating information as a way to follow what these sites are doing.
It has an interesting history, and it involves one of our favorite web browsers of old: Netscape! the “Scape” will not go away, even if the three top web browsers combined tried to eliminate it from use. Yes, it is true that no one uses Netscape anymore, but we all have to respect the name and what it brought us in terms on internet and invention.
The first version of the RSS feeds was called Resource Discription Framework(RDF), developed by a man named Ramanathan Guha at Netscape in 1999. The aim was to be the first to provide instant access to updated information say for a news site, to get the latest headlines instantly was huge back then. Now it is a thing of the past, funny how technology works, it is so fast that it leaves behind major inventions in the past like they were cavemen who made them, and it has only been a couple years!
After AOL bought Netscape and made some changes, the RSS was abandoned, but it would return through other developers. RSS feeds have become a popular way to stay informed on the internet. As if it was not easy to do that, with computer science at a very high level of innovation and user-accessibility the RSS is an add-on to an already booming information business.
What this add-on brings is knowledge of what is going on at a site that you do not have to be visiting. All you need to do is subscribe to the feed, usually by seeing this icon and clicking on it.
This little icon was used first as a symbol for?Mozilla? Firefox’s web browser, and was brought back by Microsoft Internet?Explorer?an Outlook team in 2005.
Whenever the source of the feed, whether it be ESPN or a news station or even YouTube, has a new headline, video, or update, you will know by seeing the number of updates on the icon.
The new browser Rockmelt uses RSS feeds as one of its features connected to the browser. On the right hand side are feeds that you can subscribe to. The feeds are there for real easy access. I use it for email, if I am doing some business on another website, if an email comes into my Gmail account, how would I know? With the RSS feed for Gmail, I can see if anyone sent me an email. The icon even pops out so you can preview the message before you go to the site.
You can even subscribe to this blog, the Computer Geeks Guy!