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A quick referral: Read/WriteWeb on the future of one of my favourite things, RSS.

Karine Jolie of collegewebeditor fame has a piece for the latest University Business: RSS: The Next Big Thing in University Web Communications.

With anyone working, studying, or teaching on campus feeling some level of information overload, presidents, senior officers, and other administrators must ensure their messages don't get lost. Multiple campus locations, a wide array of target audiences, limited attention span, and e-mail spam filters add to the challenge.

If only there were an easy way to deliver an institution's news or announcements in real time to the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people who really need this information-and only to them-without having to worry about ISPs or spam software blocking your messages.

Consider your wish granted. RSS can do just that for you and your institution.

Well worth a read.

I keep getting asked this question so thought I would post an answer:

What's a good newsreader to use?

I will keep my personal preferences out of it but can direct you to the University News and Events RSS page that has a list of feed readers at the bottom of the page.

Go forth and subscribe.

We have introduced RSS feeds to the University news website. The whole news and events system was rebuilt over the past 6 months and RSS feeds were always something we wanted to do and now we have finally got them live. We will now work on refining them and adding feeds to the events.

MIT libraries have a brief but useful guide to using RSS for research.

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No thinking, just linking:

• Yahoo are experimenting with tagging, launching a beta of their MyWeb 'social search engine'.
• Apple have launched iTunes 4.9 which incorporates podcast searching, subscribing and synching.
• But are the accompanying RSS extensions all they're cracked up to be?

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Ok, an admission up front, I love RSS and what it enables so the following post is going to be biased, perhaps even evangelical. There are some drawbacks with RSS, I am sure there must be because everything has its faults, but I am only going to tell you about all the good things.

Although RSS has been around for a long time, I get asked every week about what it is and why I talk about it a lot. The thing is, I am not completely au fait with how it works technically. I just know that in terms of serving and finding information it has opened up a whole new world.

What I know about RSS - the technical bits:

• RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication"
• It enables feeds (like the old-fashioned news wire feeds) from your site to be read in NewsReaders.
• It uses XML
• It is most useful on sites that have a high content turnover. Completely useless on sites that don't.
• RSS also allows headlines from your site to be displayed on another site with no hard manual labour.

What I know about RSS - the user-side bits:

• RSS enables me to read headlines through a NewsReader (I use NetNewsWire because I use a Mac most of the time)
• I don't surf the net much anymore but get feeds from a selection of sites that I find either incredibly useful or incredibly entertaining.
• I can stay up to date with news, what's going on in the blog world, the footy scores, all through one program without me actually having to remember where the stuff is on the web.
• RSS feed reading is incredibly addictive if you're a bit of a smart-**** like me who likes to get the news before anyone else, just for the hell of it.
• If you want to see if a site has a feed you look for something that says 'XML', 'Subscribe' or 'RSS'. Sometimes they use an image like this:

Where you can find out more:

• RSS explained at Search Engine Watch
• RSS for beginners
• BBC RSS page

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