Note to techies - this article is intended for the nonprofit crowd and as such is basically an introduction to RSS. There's a few interesting things at the end (RSS->animated gif via feedburner, Yahoo Pipes, and MIT/Google's Exhibit tool).
The Web 2.0 revolution has democratized huge swaths of online technology, making it easier for people who didn't grow up taking computer apart and programming games from themselves out of instructions from
3-2-1 Contact magazine article to contribute to online websites via easy-to-update blogs, wikis, and so on. These are all fantastic tools, mostly
free and open. You can also read my overall
guide to open source tools for non-profits to get situated in some terminology and theory.
There's one technology embedded in almost all of these systems that lets you track updates, news, events, even changes to a wiki page. These updates can pop up on your desktop, appear in most email clients (but not Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 supports RSS however!), appear in your web browser, and even get embedded on your web page.
This is my favorite web magic, and it's called RSS - Real Simple Syndication. Anywhere you see this symbol, there's some RSS involved.
So in short, RSS is a tool that lets a website or blog send out updates -- new content, calendar items, blog updates, and so on -- in a standard format that makes it "really simple" to include in a webpage, subscribe to in email programs, with many web browsers such as Flock or FireFox, online tools like Google Reader, and more.
Keep reading to learn more about the why and how of RSS for nonprofits!
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 US.