Explaining what is RSS for non-geeks
October 7th, 2008
Seth Godin explained today in a remarkably elegant way what is RSS for non-geeks:
(…) RSS is a little like radio. Every blog and many news services ‘broadcast’ a tiny little signal that you can’t hear, but your RSS reader can. (It’s like a radio tuner). You tell the RSS reader which blogs and news feeds you like, and whenever it senses that signal, it goes out and grabs the post for you. Quick and free. With a good reader, you can easily keep up with 100 blogs in less than an hour.
I’m definitely using this explanation the next time someone who’s not into technology asks me what’s an RSS feed (or when I want to convince this person of how useful it is, which is probably a more frequent situation).
Seth also points to The Ultimate RSS Toolbox, a round up of more than 120 RSS tools. But I must say since I got to know Google Reader, I’ve been in love with it,
Via Seth Godin’s blog.