What is RSS? RSS is a political party – no, wait. I’m not thinking about that RSS. I am talking about the good RSS here – that is Really Simple Syndication. Or Rich Site Summary. Or RDF Site Summary. Yes, that one acronym have four(that I am aware of. I am sure that there is many more) different full forms. They don’t call it ‘Really Simple’ for nothing.

The Party(not the happy kind)

I always liked RSS – we have been good friends as kids. Yes, RSS is the name of an Indian Political Party(IPP) – but I cannot hold that against RSS. Its not its fault that some politicians took its name as well. For my readers who are not Indians(Really? I got international readers? I thought it was just me and my mother), RSS(Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is a famous party in Indian. You must have at least heard of one of its members – Nathuram Godse. Yes, he is the guy who shot Mahatma Gandhi. And he was a member of RSS. To be absolutely fair, he left RSS before he shot Gandhi. So, in summary, RSS is a famous Indian Political Party. And it is not the RSS we are talking about.

Anyway, let me reiterate – RSS is not RSS. I mean, RSS the web technology is not RSS the Indian Political Party. I just wanted to make sure you got the message – I don’t want you to make the same mistake I made. The other day, I saw a parade with people holding RSS flags. And since I preferred RSS over the Atom format, I tried to join in. Big mistake. I really don’t want to talk about what happened next.

Why this Post?

I’m trying to increase my subscriber count. Since this is a non-technical blog, most of you readers don’t know what a feed is. No, it is not something that you eat. What I am trying to say is you don’t know what RSS is. No, not the political party. What about Atom? No, I am not talking about a very small particle. Why can’t the people choose unique name for these? Like ‘mugabo’. Or ‘franious’. Its not that hard – as a matter of fact, its down right easy. I can do it all day long. See – ‘magoti’, ‘neoor’, ‘mella’, ‘loral’ and so on. But when they choose names, it had to be some word that’s already in existence. Why? To make me work harder at explaining what it is. Its a conspiracy, I tell you.

But I digress – back to the point at hand – RSS. RSS is a way to simplify collection of information on the web. But I am not going to explain it more – the guys at Common Craft can do a much better job than I can ever hope to do on my own…

In conclusion, subscribe to my feed…

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BinnyvaBlog

Or if you still don’t know what RSS is, you can subscribe using your email address…

I’ll be checking my RSS stats tomorrow. I expect to see a spike in the numbers – from 2(me and my mother) to 3(me, mother and you).