Real Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) is a web feed format constructed in XML that is used in a wide variety of tools and web platforms like blogs. The mode for consumption of an RSS feed is a subscription model. You choose what information that exist in a web site or application that you wish to subscribe to and it is delivered to an application that has an aggregator built in or is an aggregator itself. Usually in a blog scenario you have the option to subscribe to the content of a blog posts or the comments from those posts or both.

An aggregators is in it’s simplest terms a the reader of said XML file and displays the information in a human readable format. These days you have a wide variety of feed readers available to you. Some of the more poplar are:

• Firefox
• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• IE 7
• Attensa for Outlook
• NewsGator/Feed Demon
• Newzcrawler

I could go on and on with the list of RSS aggregators but these web based or client based aggregators bring in your RSS feeds and give you an interface to your subscribed information. The more powerful of these aggregators like the Attensa product and to some extent the Google Reader are very good in that they measure your attention information. That means they let you know what feeds you are most interested in and bring those to the top of your aggregator.

The Attensa product has an AttentionStream™ River of News feature that lays out your feeds based on a multitude of factors that they measure including frequency of viewing, tags, length of attention and many many more.  (note: in full disclosure I have done work for Attensa, but I approached them based off the fact that they had a solid product)

To me the more interesting movement in this space is that fact that these aggregators are integrating into common applications, an example of this is Thunderbird or the new Outlook 2007 where and RSS reader is baked into an e-mail client. The proliferation of RSS is really going to spread with the advent of the new Apple OS and the RSS integration into Windows Vista, IE 7 and Office 2007.

This integration will spread the usage of RSS in majors ways. What you will find is that people will start consuming RSS and not even realize it. It will be a part of the applications that are already commonly uses. As well RSS will be a part of dynamic web sites and services like Live.com Yahoo.com or Google personalized pages or services like Page Flakes. 

You will find that RSS is becoming a major distribution methodology for information and that the usage of this syndication will spread to all types of API’s and data sets on and offline.