During my recent bloghopping sessions to other Pinoy blogs within the blogosphere, I noticed that there were quite a number of Pinoy bloggers that are still not making use of the very powerful RSS on their own blogs. This revelation alone was enough of a reason to make me set aside my leisure time to give way for a new and worthwhile article.It’s Really Simple

“RSS? Ano nga ba ‘yon?” asked a fellow blogger of mine who apparently had no idea what he is missing.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. This concept was devised to publish content taken from blogs or websites and present it into an XML format commonly known as an RSS Feed. These feeds can then be sent to different tools or RSS readers and later converted to the original content for human consumption.

This technology has been around for quite some time now and has helped in defining modern blogging. But one question looms those who hasn’t tried this syndication, “Do we really need RSS on our blogs?”

The answer is a big yes.

Benefits of RSS
For us to better understand the benefits of RSS, let me present a situation that many bloggers faced during the pre-RSS era.

Let us say that you are a blogger who loves to read blog entries from other blogs. If you were to keep track of over a hundred of blogs a day, it would take a considerable amount of time to go through all of them. This would really be a nuisance especially if you want to view blogs that only have new updates.

This is where RSS comes in, by subscribing through RSS on a particular blog, all the updates and entries of all the blogs that you have subscribed with will be sent on your selected feed reader.

This is a feed button. You can subscribe to PinoyBlogero using this button to experience the wonderful world of blogging.

RSS is also helpful on the part of the blogger who maintains a blog. Many blog readers nowadays prefer subscribing to RSS feeds, so by giving what they want they may end up as regular readers. Also, by subscribing to other blogs that has the same topic as you, you can receive content and ideas for your own blog and even some news on the blogosphere.

A Slight Drawback
RSS seems to be great and has a lot of advantages both for the blogger and its blog readers. However, there is also a little downside to this.

Because of the convenience of RSS, there may come a time that you’re readers may get too over dependent on it. The problem is readers might soon prefer reading feeds rather than going to your blog.

This is a problem experienced by most bloggers in the blogosphere today. However, there are ways on how to deal with this problem: You can instruct your site’s feeds to take only a part or just the titles of your content or you could also persuade readers to visit your blog by encouraging interaction on comments and other stuffs. More on this will be discussed soon.

What are you waiting for?
Even with the little drawback brought forth by using RSS, one must take into consideration the advantages of having this nifty feature on your blog. Not only will it open a number of opportunities for you and for your readers, it will also increase the chances of converting those one time visitors into regular readers.

Hey, everybody is doing it, so why don’t you?

So there you have it, a quick overview of the importance of RSS on blogging. I hope that I have given you a little background on RSS and taught you why you need it on your blog.

On the following days, I will discuss how RSS can be added on your site. While waiting for it, why not leave a message at the comments section while waiting? Or you could also try subscribing to my RSS through the buttons below.