RSS & FM Radio

Yesterday I gave a workshop at the New York Library Association (NYLA) conference on "Social Networking Tools." The 22 people in the workshop came with varying levels of familiarity with social networking tools and everyone left with new information. Many people said they had ideas they wanted to follow-up on. Polly Farrington posted some notes in her blog from the session.

One person asked about RSS (really simple syndication) and wanted to know what it was. The good news is that we don't really need to understand how RSS works. I likened receiving RSS to listening to FM radio stations. RSS allows people to "broadcast" content on the Internet, in the same way FM radio broadcasts many signals into the atmosphere. With FM radio, we use a receiver to help us pick up the signal we want to hear. With RSS, we use an RSS aggregation (like Bloglines) to help us pick up the content we want to read (or just be aware of). That content could be photos, videos, podcasts, vodcasts (video podcasts), or text.

How do you find the RSS "signals" that you want to follow? Ask your colleagues what they are reading or listening to. Do some searches on the Internet to find content that may be of interest. You can use blog search engines (e.g., Google or Technorati).

BTW I don't know if the FM radio analogy is the best one for RSS, but it worked yesterday, and that's all I can ask for!