Chris, myself and a number of others have expressed our belief in and support for RSS as a method of getting content from the Web to your desktop. While it has maintained a high level of growth, the average Joe has not completely jumped on board yet.

Still, people like Fergus Burns, CEO of Nooked, believe that it will not only continue to grow in use, but the advantages of RSS will become more mainstream with Microsoft’s Longhorn and as Yahoo continues to expand on its use of this syndication tool.

I was wondering whether RSS could become a daily tool for PR Pro in the management of our PR campaign. I feel there is a lot of potential applications for it but wanted to hear an expert giving me his vision on this topic.

Fergus Burns, CEO of Nooked has kindly accepted to answer my questions, knowing that the goal is to determine if RSS is to become a must for our industry.

(Nooked is NOT one of our clients….)

Can you explain RSS in few words for people who never heard about it?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a relatively old technology, that is now becoming the de-facto standard for the publishing and subscribing of web content.

RSS is published in feeds or channels, and read using a new category of software called news aggregators – check bloglines, my yahoo, newsgator and feeddemon for good examples of news aggregators.

RSS is gaining broad industry adoption, particularly from its strong association with weblogs. RSS is an extremely efficient way of consuming information – it enables better productivity for everyone.

At Microsoft’s Annual CEO Summit, Bill Gates advocated RSS, by saying

“Getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail – that its too imposing – and yet the drawbacks of the web site – that you don’t know if there’s something new and interesting there – [RSS] is about solving that”
The easiest way to explain RSS is to start using it – sign up at www.bloglines.com to start subscribing to RSS channels.