RSS explained by Educause

A couple of months ago I wrote about Educause’s “7 Things You Should Know About Creative Commons,” which is part of a series designed to help faculty and administrators keep current with technologies that impact scholarly communications.  Now a new virtual pamphlet is available, “7 Things You Should Know About RSS.“  RSS, which is usually said to stand for “Really Simple Syndication,” is an Internet protocol that allows users to subscribe to content feeds from lots of blogs and other web resources, and aggregate that content into a convenient reader.

Many readers of this blog probably already know about RSS, since it is one of the ways to subscribe to our feed.   But it is worth keeping this simple, jargon-free explanation in mind, along with the other 2-page pamphlets in the series, because they are so useful for explaining to others those things that we ourselves might use frequently but have difficulty articulating.  As it does so often, Educause has provided an important service to the world of technology in higher education.