RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. RSS feeds are really just a different kind of web page to the ones you’re probably used to. They typically contain news content that updates on a regular basis and are designed to be read by computers rather than people before they display in a user friendly way. Using RSS allows you to quickly see when content on your favourite websites or pages has updated.
To correctly display a RSS feed you need what is called a news reader. There are many different kinds of RSS news readers available including many that are free. Indeed, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 have built in news readers to enable you to read the news stories from within your web browser.
Google has made available a free news reader application that can be accessed via the Internet. Yahoo! and AOL also have free news reader applications built into their portals. Other news readers are downloadable applications that allow you to store your news feeds on a local computer.
Once you’ve decided how you would like to read news feeds you need to subscribe to your favourite feeds to see the content as it updates. Once you’ve subscribed to a feed you will automatically receive the most up-to-date content available for that feed.
Not all websites use RSS feeds yet but the number is growing rapidly. You can easily see which websites use RSS by the familiar orange icon that has become a universal symbol of RSS.
Another advantage of RSS is that, if you run a website, you can choose to publish the content from a RSS feed on your website so that your users always see the most up-to-date stories from that feed.
Colliers encourages the use of its feeds on your site subject to the necessary attribution text appearing along with the feed. This should read ‘Colliers CRE’.