Becoming Aware of RSS

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Summary

Many people use RSS and do not know it. Here are some things to watch for in order to become aware of RSS on the Web.

• The RSS orange icon or RSS, XML, or FEED in white letters signals an RSS Feed.
• Most browsers signal with the RSS orange icon each time you browse a website with a feed.
• Popular services are being built using RSS feeds.

Detail

When hunting for RSS on the Wild Wild Web, here are some signs for the alert hunter.

The RSS Icon

Icons: It's still orange - Microsoft and Mozilla got together and agreed on a standard icon for RSS. It has become the defacto icon standard, even though many sites still use other icons.

Most sites do agree that buttons and icons for RSS Feeds are orange. The following are other icons and buttons that signify RSS.

The Browsers:

Firefox has a special feature for RSS feeds. If you are using Firefox and browsing a website that has an associated feed, an orange icon shows up on the navigation toolbar to the right of the address.

To illustrate:

Mouse over the icon

Subscribe to this page ...

Left click on the icon

Display the RSS Feed file

Browsers with a similar process: Opera, Netscape, and Safari.

Popular Services are being built on RSS feeds.

Web Service aggregators are being built.

PopUrls

"Popurls is the dashboard for the latest web-buzz, a single page that encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from the most popular sites on the internet."

AllTop

"We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from "all the top" sites on the web."

The "My" services let one build your own site using RSS feeds.

MyYahoo

"All the things that matter to you, all on one page."

MyAOL

"myAOL is about you and what you want to see and do on the Web."

iGoogle

"Google offers the ability to create a personalized iGoogle page that gives you at-a-glance access to key information from Google and across the web."

And just for fun.

This is a button seen at Tech Conferences.

RSS at Halloween