Scraping, filling and seeding content with RSS

CLONMEL HOTSPOT -- There's a punch-up in the world of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) right now, with IBM aligning against the current RSS standards many of us (like the Beeb) use to cross-syndicate content. While the fight continues and the sides pitch technology at the content creators, I think it's important to sell the idea of RSS to anyone who updates their Web content more than once a week. I think a good RSS feed triples readership. I know I can read at least three times as many Web sites now that I turn my newsreaders onto the task. While I type this text, Newzcrawler has hoovered 157 different sites. I could tell my laptop to print the result and it would produce more than 150 pages of content from my unread and newly harvested topics. RSS readers scrape content that others have assessed is worth reading. Like a big tractor pulling dirt, the RSS reader moves the freshly scraped content to a location where it's often repurposed. But for that to happen, it has to be read first. Three times as many people read my content this way than read it as an HTML page. RSS has changed the Web reading experience for most of my regular readers.

---

Google finds at least 100 "advantages of RSS."
x_ref125ms