Some time a go I attended a session where a staff member from a newsagency described how staff collected news items on specific subjects for subscribers to access using RSS newsreaders. The session was very technical dealing with xhtml , xml as well as rss and I left being impressed at what could be achieved but confused by the process and the jargon.
Since then I have tended to put rss , xml etc into the 'will look at this later' category. However recently I was asked about adding podcasts to a website and started to look seriously at using rss as a means of alerting users to the site that a new podcast had been added. This exercise therefore came at the right time for me as experimenting with Bloglines has demonstrated the usefulness of adding RSS to a site where the content is regularly changing.
RSS is becoming more accessible with the latest version of browsers including functions to read RSS feeds. RSS will no doubt become a standard feature on websites with changing content - though in my searching I was surprised at a number of the large cultural institutions not already doing this.
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