Often times during the development of technologies several attempts to capture the market are made as various formats of a product are offered to the public. You may recall the Betamax vs VHS format wars of the mid 1970s that were waged to determine the best delivery system for video tape recording, or most recently the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks.

The same thing happened with web syndication as early offerings of Microsoft’s CDF (Channel Definition Format) and Netscape’s RSS (Really Simple Syndication), along with a few others, vied to become the industry standard.

RSS has become the industry standard, as seen on nearly every blog in existence today. In 2003 Atom arrived on the scene as an alternative to RSS, which has been around since 1997. Atom, while still heavily in use, will not overtake the RSS format in my opinion as RSS just seems to be what most users have become comfortable with and is now widely accepted as the industry leader.

A quick flashback – there was a time when your browser’s bookmarks were the tool used to keep track of places you wanted to return to and check out the latest updates. There was no automation involved here as you had to do all the work yourself.

I’ve always been a heavy surfer so for me, keeping track of all the websites I visited, even with the bookmark system, was a challenge and if I didn’t keep them organized things got a bit messy.

There were times when life got in the way and I hadn’t checked my bookmarks for a period of time, meaning that I missed out on some information. But along came RSS and suddenly things were much easier to manage.

Today you have the ability to subscribe to many sites and have the latest updates delivered right to your desktop without all of the tracking and organizing associated with bookmarks. Now don’t misunderstand me, bookmarks remain a handy tool, but for my most critical updates RSS is the ticket.

By the way, when you see the word “Subscribe” on this or any other blogs, it simply means that you are signing up for “free” updates and you can end the service at any time.

I realize that many have been conditioned to associate subscribe and subscriptions with a fee, but that is not what this is about in the world of blogging. What you will receive are notices about the latest content added to the site or a weekly/monthly newsletter related to the topic of the blog itself.

Some time ago I wrote an article titled “RSS and How to Use It” where I explain the basics of the service. You can access it here.

For those of you who are not using RSS, you should begin now by finding a few feeds to subscribe to. It’s a very easy process.

Go to one of your favorite sites and click the RSS symbol, which will then take you to a page where you will select a free news reader like Google, Newsgator or a host of others available today. You can also choose to have the updates deliver via email, the choice is yours.

Think of this service as a publication like a magazine or newspaper, but instead of being delivered to your physical mailbox, it is delivered to your electronic mailbox or your browser. Having the feed appear right in your browsers toolbar is really cool, convenient and easy to use.

So go ahead and subscribe to a couple of sites and get started. The feed to this blog is here.

Just remember, whenever you see this icon it represents a free news feed service that delivers content conveniently to your desktop.

If you are using more recent versions of Safari and Opera browsers, you’ll find that the RSS features have been incorporated right in the browsers themselves. Never has it been so easy to pull content from so many places into a single location for your reading pleasure.

With RSS you can gather all sorts of information from all corners of the globe and bring it to your desktop. This is really powerful when you think about it. You have the flexibility to customize the exact type of information you’d like to receive from anywhere on the internet. All of this, with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Once you realize the power of this tool, the possibilities of what you can achieve will rapidly grow, as you become an internet power user.

Enjoy the power of RSS!