Syndicating Agriculture News With RSS

Rich Site Summary, also known as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), is a technology used to distribute news and information from a Web site. RSS is a particularly useful tool for news organizations since these syndication feeds automatically notify the end-user that fresh information has been posted to a Web site, and it also avoids the use of e-mail. This innovation can be an effective way to distribute news releases and breaking news items. Instead of clicking on a Web site to see if fresh content has been posted, individuals that have news reader software programs running on their desktop computers receive the information as soon as it is posted to the Web. Texas A&M Agricultural Communications, an early adopter of RSS, began implementing an RSS feed in September 2003 and received national attention for this innovation in the February 2004 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since implementing an RSS feed on the http://agnews.tamu.edu Web site, more than 1,500 additional hits have been recorded each month. The new technology also has been discovered by journalists, who are finding RSS a much faster method of receiving news and story ideas