Microsoft® Outlook® 2007 Bible

Chapter 16. Making Use of RSS Feeds

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding RSS feeds

• Subscribing to RSS feeds

• Viewing RSS feeds

• Deleting and changing RSS feeds

• Importing and exporting collections of RSS feeds

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a family of web feed formats that are used to deliver content over the Internet. The term syndication refers to the fact that you subscribe to one or more specific feeds and your software—Outlook in this case—automatically receives the files and displays the information they contain. You can subscribe to RSS feeds on just about any topic you can imagine—news, sports, finance, weather...you name it.

Understanding RSS

Though most people interpret RSS to stand for Really Simple Syndication, the fact is that it is a whole family of syndication formats that includes Really Simple Syndication as well as Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary. But in reality, the precise syndication format is irrelevant to you, the end user, as long as you get the information you want.

RSS is particularly useful because it lets you combine information from a variety of sources in one location. No longer do you have to visit separate web sites for news, weather, stock reports, and so on. Instead you can subscribe to the RSS feed from each of the web sites and then have titles or brief summaries displayed in your RSS reader. When a title catches your interest, click the link to read the entire article.

Most modern web browsers support RSS feeds, and there are also many stand-alone ...