The picture above is the RSS feed of Yahoo’s new movie releases. RSS, or real simple syndication, is a great way to monitor massive amount of information. Every morning I check roughly 50 different blogs and news sites to see if anything important has developed in the world of eCommerce. Clicking through to each site would take hours, so I use an RSS reader to check which sites have updated their content and to read articles. Basically, RSS is a great way to keep informed of changes in the content of a site.

However, only 5% of American adults use RSS right now and 88% of at work Americans don’t even know what RSS is. (If this includes you, just click on the first link of this article to find out) Why am I suggesting its use then? First let’s look at an example of an RSS feed one of our clients, Spark Fun Electronics, uses. This is the news section on their homepage:

This is what their RSS feed looks like:

While their RSS feed doesn’t include pictures, this can be accomplished. It is the ability to quickly scan articles that makes RSS such a time saver. Now, back to those statistics. Most Americans started using email because it was included with AOL and was easily learned. I firmly believe RSS will experience the same adoption rate when the world’s most popular web browser, Internet Explorer, is updated with an included RSS reader. The new version should do for RSS what AOL did for email. Is your site ready?