Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is all the rage today and Yahoo is feeling the rage as well. Yahoo has a number of products that pick up RSS feeds including My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mobile, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! 360 just to name a few.
RSS is really quite an interesting concept. It’s an easy for people on the next to syndicate their site or blog or whatever into a variety of formats. In most cases, it’s an inexpensive way to develop customer bases and create traffic for your site and Yahoo! is working hard to get people there.
Yahoo! currently rates as the number 2 search engine in content, just behind Google. I personally have used Yahoo! for years as my personal startup page and have always been pleased with. Now they’ve really got this nice feature, which will run my ads, your ads, or anyone else’s AND let you customize your content more than has ever been possible.
One of the biggest selling points of the RSS system comes from its customizable features. Yahoo allows you to build RSS feeds just for the individual user so if you want some just stories following Star Wars, then by golly, you’ll get them. And the musings of Ann Coulter is more your speed, she’s there too, waiting for you.
Another good point is you avoid spam filters and subscription management problems. Also, more and more big news companies are getting into the RSS line of thinking every day. Most major news agencies like the New York Times, CNN, and Time magazine just to name a couple.
Yahoo! has an excellent guide section to explain how their system works. They also support a number of versions of RSS including Atom although their preference is 2.0. RSS runs in XML and I would have to say RSS is certainly going to be trend as more and more people and companies pick up on the beauties of the RSS feeds.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
