RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard format for delivering any kind of web content as a 'news feed'. There are many 3rd-party software applications for reading and organising news feeds; these allow users to very quickly scan a number of feeds to check for updates or interesting new content. Instead of having to visit every site you want to keep up-to-date with, wading through each web interface, you just browse through the news feeds that you 'subscribe' to; the feeds are displayed very tersely so you can scan quickly.

A user 'subscribes' to a news feed by entering a special URL into her news-reading program. These special URLs are usually available on compliant sites by right-clicking on icons with names like 'RSS', 'XML' or 'syndicate this site' and copying the special link location.

Another popular use for RSS feeds is to share news and updates between websites; one site will display a summary of the latest items from another site - usually in a little portlet or box. In these cases, it is servers which 'read' the news feeds, turning them into html to display in their own pages. Our portals, for instance, can display other sites' news feeds (this is a panesfolder option for all users, and can also be used by admin to make news portlets).

Users of our portals may have noticed that the Plone content-management system the portals are based on already supports RSS pretty thoroughly. Search results, for instance, always have a little RSS icon which links to the RSS URL for subscribing to a 'canned search'. It is also possible (depending on a site-wide preference) to turn syndication on for any content you have permissions over; in that case the content will have an RSS feed widget (in the NGRF site this is one of the tools in the left hand portlets area). However, this is of limited usefulness since it only shows updates to particular folders.

What we have done:

We have made our discussion system very RSS-friendly. All discussion topics have an RSS feed, and we've also exposed links for subscribing to site-wide updates on new discussion items posted. We have also made the RSS feeds for discussions very efficient to serve, so it will not slow the site down if there are a lot of subscriptions. The RSS feed for a discussion topic will include updates anywhere within the thread branching of that topic, however deep. We'll also make sure that we provide easy access to RSS feeds for other containers of discussion, such as team-tasks.

But the advantage of having efficient RSS versions for all discussions goes well beyond the convenience of using a news reader to track discussions. RSS feeds can also be aggregated - which means a number of feeds can be woven together into one list of updates. We will be adding a 'My Discussions' feature to leverage this capability. Users will be able to add a discussion to 'My Discussions', and will be able to go to their own 'My Discussions' area to read an 'aggregated' list of updates across all their discussions, or to subscribe to a special 'My Discussions' newsfeed. We will also be using the RSS feeds as the basis of email updates.

Another use for the RSS feeds from discussions is for displaying overviews of discussion traffic at 'high levels'. For instance, the 'Discussions' area of some of our sites display a little box with the most recent 6 discussion items from anywhere in the site.

We will shortly be providing all site members with their own weblogs (see below); these will also be available for aggregating into 'My Discussions'. We will also be introducing powerful new features for taxonomic categories and resource-repository building; these will also be subscribable as RSS and aggregatable by members into their own personalised feeds.

Also note that, with trackback capability and thorough access to RSS feeds, it will be straightforward to deeply integrate content across sites, and to integrate our sites with content from other systems.