During Manan’s Getting to Know session this afternoon on blogs and academic blogging someone asked a question about RSS.. what is it, what should I know about it? The term RSS (or, an RSS feed) is a bit like a Matryoshka doll. Take off the first layer (RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) and you’re no wiser than you were before you started. It’s actually not a difficult concept to understand per se – the problem is that the terms used to describe it often require their own explanations, and so it goes…
We will probably offer a “Getting to Know” session on RSS at some point in the near future. But in the meantime, here’s something I ran across recently that offers a witty and entertaining explanation of RSS using the time honoured academic lecture technique of “hand waving”. Watch this short video animation, and you may not want to come to our brown-bag session anymore.
Until then, for those of you who prefer written explanations, we’ve taken a first stab at it on this page of our blog.
