What is RSS
Summary
I recently ran a quick poll on PharmiWeb, to determine what level of awareness there was for RSS (really simple syndication). So...According to our quick RSS survey, 68% of respondents had no idea what it was or how to use it. This is a shame as we, and many other sites in the pharmaceutical industry are providing them.
So lets start with "what is RSS?" - essentially its a data standard that allows data to be made available in a format that can be easily picked up by a simple reader you install on your computer. In reality there are several standards, but most reader software reads them all. What this means to you is that by installing a small piece of software, you can elect to collect news (or whatever information sites make available) from across the web, and collect them into a single place on your computer.
In effect, RSS gives you the ability to create a kind of personalised newspaper on your computer. You decide what information you want to include in it. I've set mine up to includes a load of pharma industry news (from various sources), some general news (from the BBC), and some sports news (from some specialist sites).
I personally use RSSREADER, a product from rssreader.com, but I also have a plugin for my firefox browser called sage. Both these are free, so there is no excuse not to check them out.
At PharmiWeb.com we are busy adding RSS feeds for various sections of the site and various categories of content. Check out this page for the latest RSS feed list on PharmiWeb.com
