Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
RSS in it’s newest format (2.0), is short for Really Simple Syndication, but depending on what version you are referring to, RSS can also mean; Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary, not that there are many differences between them.
Technical Specs
RSS is a part of the XML markup (Decker et. al, 2002), which can be thought of in relation to the traditional HTML markup used by web browsers today. XML is just another way of writing information that is supposed to be interpreted by an application, such as a web browser, a feed reader and can carry all sorts of content including music and videos as we know it from podcasts. RSS is as defined by Vossen, (2007, p 48) a format to which:
“users or clients can subscribe to a host of information from the Web, so that obtaining information (e.g., stock tickers, special offers, news, and nowadays often podcasts) can be automated in various ways.”
This is a perfect example of what Tim Berners Lee wanted from The Semantic Web, the ability for computers to understand the data that are out there and available on the web. His ideas (Berner-Lee, 2001) about the semantic web are nicely summed up by Vossen, (2007, p 282)
“The idea of adding more meaning to what can be found on the Web today and to do so in such a way that this information becomes not only machine-readable (as it is already today), but also machine- understandable; today it is only understandable to humans.”
iTunes & Lastfm
A good example of this is iTunes which uses xml feeds to pull podcasts from web sites, although a music file or video only makes sense to us humans (computers doesn’t have ears or eyes), distributing to the content via RSS allows us to send information with it that is understandable by computers. What iTunes understands here is what time the latest podcast was released, if it couldn’t read the date of when the podcast was published it wouldn’t know when to download the next episode.
Another instance where this idea of the semantic web is used, and although it’s not really RSS it’s a great example of what this is all about. Lastfm let’s people download software that send there listening habits to a central database, this lets users compare taste and lets users tag songs, directly from their desktop. As I don’t know how the software works, it seem like some kind of reverse RSS feed. here it is Lastfm pulling the data from the user, and putting straight into it’s database. You could play around with this idea a bit further and in relation to the music business, it could be useful in the way that you could let people send information about their music taste to a company. You could imagine apple using this to extract information from users using iTunes, then when you visited the iTunes store they could like amazon does; show you content based on you listening habits.
The Music Business
In relation to how you could make use of RSS in an online music business, there are several obvious possibilities such as podcasting and news articles from favourite bands etc. Podcasting has the obvious connection to the music business because you can distribute audio and video, but i think there are other possibilities to RSS than just the obvious ones. RSS is all about automating things, and if used in conjunction with other automation processes there are no really limit to the what you can do with RSS. If you as a record label have artist information on your web site, you could include a flickr feed that would show public photos tagged with that bands name on flickr. This can obviously be extended to venues, a venue could include public photos from an event. Same idea applies to services like rsscalendar and localcalendar, both calendar services which let’s you create a calendar with a rss feed for it. You could then create a calendar for each bands and display the calendar on your web site and offer it to fans, so that they always would know what their favourite band where up to.
There are so many things you can do, Yahoo for example have a mapping service where you can parse RSS information to it, and it will be displayed on the map. You have endless possibilities with this service, you could take the calendar RSS feed for an artist and integrate it in a map. You could then integrate that map into your artist’s web site and people would always be able to see where that artist were playing.
YouTube Definition
I know it’s a daunting post 
Bibliography:
BERNERS-LEE, T., J. HENDLER, O. LASSILA (2001): The Semantic Web – A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities; Scientific American, Vol. 284, No. 5, May, pp. 35–43.
DECKER, STEFAN AND FRANK VAN HARMELEM, JEEN BROEKSTRA, MICHAEL ERDMANN, DIETER FENSEL, IAN HORROCKS, MICHEL KLEIN, SERGEY MELNIK. The Semantic Web: On the Respective Roles of XML and RDF. Last Update 2002. Available from http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil/downl/IEEE00.pdf.
HAMMERSLEY, B. (2003) Content syndication with RSS, Beijing Farnham, O’Reilly.
VOSSEN, G. & HAGEMANN, S. (2007) Unleashing Web 2.0 : from concepts to creativity, Amsterdam ; Boston, Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann.
Filed under: rss | 3 Comments
Tags: feed, rss, Semantic Web
A very clearly and interesting definition of RSS, thanks Kasper. It always good to read your article to understand something new.
I like the way you explain RSS, and the youtube Video, and I have read every words of your article, an excellent work you have show me to understand RSS more!
And thanks for the youtube video it shows clearly! Thanks again!
You’re right Kasper, RSS is really simple (it even says it is in it’s title), but to try and explain it, that’s a lot harder. I think that we’re only just beginning to realise what RSS and XMl code can really be used for, and that the results are hopefully going to be inventive and exciting!