What is RSS and why should you use it

This little write up is for those of you that get my blog posts through email.

I will try to explain RSS in a simple fashion so that everyone might understand how it can help with managing your time.

What is RSS?
The technical acronym for RSS is ?Really Simple Syndication???. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but for most of you what comes to mind is, ?Uh, I don?t get it?????

?

?

?

?

?

?

To make this simple lets start with this scenario. You have 50 website you like to read daily. (I have many more than that). Do you get tired of the hassle of going to each website to see whats new? You’re Real Estate Agent and you don’t have time to waste going to 50 different websites. With RSS, you can ?subscribe??? to a website or blog, and get ?fed??? all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites and blogs in one list, and see what?s going on in minutes instead of hours. How would like to use this method as an effective use of your time.

What program do you use to make, manage and read this list?
This is an easy but hard answer. The easy answer is you use what is called a “Feed Reader” . The hard part of this answer is there are many, many, many “Feed Readers” and you have to choose which one to use. Here is a link to a lot a whole bunch of Feed Readers organized by Operating System ‘here’?. What do I recommend? Hmmm, well I use Outlook 2007 and IE7 to manage my RSS feeds and I love it, but then again I am an Outlook Junkie. You can also use IE7 and Outlook 2003. I think the most popular Feed Reader is probably Google. Reader or Bloglines.

After you have chosen your Feed Reading Program, you can now Subscribe to a website or blog. We will use my blog as an example. On the right side of my blog you see this little icon that looks like this ?and next to it the text “Subsribe”. If you have installed a feed program you will be able to click on this link and then the program ‘should’ take over and import the subscription information for this blog. You may have different results for each program but you should get the basic idea.

If you are running IE7, Safari or Firefox you will have a little icon like above on your toolbar where you can click on that button and then subscribe to the feed that is detected at any website.

I hope this little tutorial saves you time and makes your reading more enjoyable.

Loren Nason
Future of Real Estate Technology