"Explaining RSS is like explaining sex. You just don't get it until you do it." - George Siemens (2003)
Syndication, and the syndication protocol known as RSS (for "really simple syndication"), has become a very popular adjunct of blogs (see also the section on blogs in this book). RSS allows blog authors (or anybody else) to distribute their new content to topic-focussed "channels" and for blog readers to "subscribe" to such channels. In practice this means that I can, for example, stay up to date with what a whole range of blog authors have been saying about e.g. collaborative learning, without the hassle of having to read each author's blog (including their musings on all sorts of topics I am not interested in). RSS is a very simple XML mark-up system, so it is relatively easy to make one's content available in RSS-encoded form (i.e. to create an "RSS feed"). To read RSS-encoded content, one can either simply visit a website which aggregates RSS feeds relating to a topic one is interested in or use a desktop program such as AmphetaDesk or FeedReader (or check out this long list of RSS readers).
Introductions to RSS
RSS in Collaborative Learning
Mary Harschh (2003) has written an interesting article on RSS: The next killer app for education. She lists several useful ways of using RSS in education, although they are mainly of the one-to-many content-broadcasting variety. In the context of collaborative learning, syndication is perhaps most interesting because it facilitates (as is illustrated in the world of blogging) the formation of smaller interest groups within a larger distributed system, with each participant in the system typically belonging to several interest groups - so that there is much overlap among groups, but no single large group.
The first part of Eva Kaplan-Leiserson's (2004) RSS: A learning technology (published in Learning Circuits) is an introduction to RSS, but the second half contains many pointers to how RSS can be used in distributed collaborative learning environments in place of cumbersome, centralised Learning Management Systems.
Where to find RSS feeds
Many sites, especially blogs have a link to their RSS file, often in the form of an orange RSS or XML button. Copy this link into your RSS reader and the reader will start checking it periodically. There are also many directories of RSS feeds, such as:
How-to's and other resources
"Bloglines is a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines. Unlike other aggregators which require you to download and install software, Bloglines runs on our servers and requires no installation."
Yahoo groups provides RSS feeds of messages posted to a group - the RSS address is the same as the group's message archive address, just add the extension "messages?rss=1".
"How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer" by Stephen Downes (2003). Excellent, very easy to follow guide for people who want to do the low-level tinkering themselves.
RSS - the downside
Because RSS feeds are regularly checked for new content by RSS readers subscribed to the feed, they can become a severe drain on a site's bandwidth. Gary Lawrence Murphy (2003) describes the "the great sucking sound RSS can make when set out into the real world".
Aggregating RSS channels
A key promise of RSS is that individual RSS feeds with similar content can be aggregated so that one can subscribe to these aggregate channels rather than to dozens of individual channels. The internet topic exchange (http://topicexchange.com/) has a growing collection of aggregate channels of this sort, as has Stephen Downe's edu-RSS (http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/xml/edu_rss.cgi). S�bastien Paquet (2003) identifies a number of basic operations that can be performed when feeds are combined: