Posted by Bender on Jan 06, 2005 at 18:19:30

You may have noticed that MeZine has an RSS news feed. Actually, it has two - one for comments and one for stories.

I was beginning to think that RSS/Atom/etc had gone mainstream, since more and more sites began to offer syndication links to their content. At first, it was mainly blogs and tech sites that had the little orange xml buttons on their sites. But recently, Yahoo! News began to offer feeds, and so, I thought, everyone must know what RSS is.

Then my sister came over when she was home for Christmas, and she pointed to the Syndicate (RSS) link on the home page of the MeZine development server, and said, “What’s that?”

“You don’t know what RSS is?” I asked, kind of surprised, since she’s generally pretty techy.

“No.”

I explained it, probably poorly. I’d explain it here but those links above will do a much better job.

Firefox, the ever-more-popular browser from the Mozilla Foundation, now allows you to subscribe easily to RSS feeds as you browse the web (and Apple’s excellent Safari web browser will soon do the same). Free and cheap RSS news aggregators are popping up all over the place, as well as web-based news aggregators like Bloglines.

It seems clear that RSS is, like, big. MeZiners: Have you heard of RSS? Do you use it? I want to know if b is an anomaly or if it really hasn’t hit the masses yet.