RSS for Dummies

This is a great article by Sharon Housley and I'll pile on with a few additional comments.

One thing that's extremely important about RSS (and seems to escape the initial glance) is the notion of detecting change; the ability to know what's new about the information that the RSS feed represents. Condensing headlines is great; it allows you to quickly glance and see what's important. But to know precisely what's new at that moment, turbocharges the process, saving you time from looking at items that you may have already looked at.

Another point—higher search engine visibility is not possible by simply aggregatating RSS feeds in a Web page using Javascript. It's important to understand that search engines are not like Web browsers; they don't see what we see. As such, if your aggregation machinery is client-side (i.e., runs in the Web browser), Google will not leverage the RSS content. If adopting RSS as a measure of search optimization, consider the machinery necessary to truly benefit from this idea. MyST provides aggregation and presentation services that are server-based.

Companies like Nethawk.net take advantage of this (you'll see the streaming RSS feeds right on their home page), and it has positive affects on their visibility. Furthermore, they've chosen a unique implementation that uses our Market Syndication Services engine. They harvest interesting stories relevant to their industry segment (marketing services) and then serve up random selections of the feed to the home page. This has the affect of showing a different set of items with each request of the page; good for human visitors and great for search engines.