Not only is this the best darn explanation of why and how to use RSS to keep up with all the information on the web but it is a wonderful example of how a short, simple, funny video can explain things online (where visuals matter).
What is RSS and why should you care? I could chat about this all day but folks at Democracy in Action did instead and did it better than I would have. So you should go take a look at this post on their blog titled…
Why Nonprofit Managers Must Use RSS … And How to Start
Using RSS is (really, I kid you not) quite simple. IE7 and Firefox browsers (use Firefox, use Firefox, use Firefox…) have RSS readers built in that work quite well.
Creating RSS content is sometimes simple. Sometimes not so simple. Blogs make it easy. All posts on ecommarama is automagically turned into RSS content. Our website at wilderness.org does NOT, unfortunately, make it easy.
But if you’re not using RSS to keep up with news, blog posts and content from useful website then you probably should look into it. Might also give you a sense of how we could use it on our own site.
You probably know that you can search news items at Google News and get headlines/descriptions emailed to you regularly and/or subscribe to them as an RSS feed.
Right now, it’s pulling in terms like:
There are probably other terms that come to mind (wildlife refuges for one) which could be added. This is still a work in progress but thought it might be useful to someone at this point. Still pulls in some irrelevant articles and has a bit of a time delay. But it’s quick and easy to use.
If anyone uses an rss reader (Firefox and IE 7 have built in RSS readers, btw) and simply wants to pull these same rss feeds that’s possible.