RSS is one of my favorite technologies on the internet. It allows me to quickly gain and overview of the newest articles at my favorite sites like CNN, Tech-Crunch, Digg, Slashdot and others. Today is RSS Awareness Day.

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.

The main benefit of RSS is that it enables people to stay connected with their favorite websites without having to visit them. Once you subscribe to a particular RSS feed, you will automatically receive updates from the website that publishes the feed, whenever they release new content.

From this, I can access these news feeds at any time from my PC, iPod Touch, or Treo. I am able to stay informed of the days news as it happens, without all the distraction or clutter of advertisements, slow websites, snarky comments and the like.

Back in 2005 5% of the Internet users said they were using RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online (according to the Pew Internet Project).

Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if we bump that number to 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, as of today.

What is the takeaway message? Only a very small percentage of the Internet population is aware of the RSS format and its benefits, and that number is growing slowly over time.

By creating the RSS Awareness Day and celebrating it every year we should be able to get the general public exposed to this format, hopefully increasing the usage of RSS feeds and related applications among Internet users.

More information: http://rssday.org/spread/

Some of the best examples of using RSS feeds to enhance your productivity and general ‘awareness’ of whats going on can best be experienced on a ‘Start Page’ site like Netvibes or PageFlakes. You can add multiple RSS feeds to your page and view many at once, instead of crawl through each site individually, which would take a lot longer. This way you get a bigger overall picture and can zero in on the news stories that pique your interest rather quickly.

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