You don’t have to look far these days to find examples of people getting fed up with being spoon fed the content selected by the giant monolithic tech giants and their engagement algorithms. Much like the demand for access to information on the terms of the individual drove much of the early days of World Wide Web expansion, people are increasingly demanding ways to access information and news in the manner, order, and from the sources they choose. Neither the trend nor the sentiment behind it is particularly new or novel, but after a decade of Social Media dominance, it is bringing us to somewhat of a crossroad.

What will the future of content delivery look like? Should we look backwards to go forwards? Time will tell the path we choose, but in the meantime let’s look at one contender for distribution and aggregation.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a computer readable format, served as XML, that allows reader software to poll a site to determine if new content is available, and retrieve at least some related content. Most readers function much like email clients, but retrieve content like news posts or blog entries in place of mail messages.

RSS allows a single feed reader or news aggregator to consolidate content from several sources as it becomes available, that means it can be a wonderful tool to allow a user to keep up to date on several content sources on their own time without either having to check each site, or be slave to the constant smartphone notifications that demand immediate attention and destroy focus.

In other words, RSS relies on a PULL model for content instead of the PUSH model that almost every major tech company has been trying to implement over the last decade. As a user, instead of immediately getting a notification on your phone that your third cousin twice removed commented angrily on a post from someone you’ve never heard of, you can check a consolidated feed of posts and sites you’re interested in when you have the time and desire, and it will always be up to date. As a content creator or site administrator, you can simply post notifications and content and know that subscribers will get them and review them at their leisure instead of having to try to write clickbait titles to float to the top of the inbox clutter, or send 100s of notifications to keep constant engagement lest someone forget about you.

That pull model allows for an experience somewhat more analogous to getting the paper in the morning and reading it at your own pace, rather than watching the 24/7 CNN coverage or constantly scrolling Twitter in an attempt to get a picture of the news of the day.

RSS certainly isn’t for everybody, either on the user or creator side of the equation. But it does certainly look appealing to many right now, and is likely to be one of the forks in the technology road that people may wander down.

Have you ever wanted to implement an RSS feed in your own website or blog? Do you develop with Node.js? Keep an eye out for our upcoming how-to guide on implementing a feed of your own.

*Update* - Our guide is now available @ https://www.technocentrist.com/howtos/byheadline/4-2022-noderssfeed