RSS for Associations

RSS has powerful applications for associations today and in the future.

By C. David Gammel, CAE, President, High Context Consulting, LLC.

Before Web 2.0, before AJAX, before the .com bubble burst, there was RSS. However, this simple technology has only recently become an unlikely yet powerfully useful standard for communicating and sharing content. Associations should begin exploring how to use RSS now in order to be positioned to take the best advantage of the technology when it achieves ubiquity in the next few years.

What is RSS
An RSS file is a simple XML document. XML stands for extensible markup language, which is a text-based method for encoding text and data using tags. XML documents are very similar to HTML in how they are created. RSS files typically contain several items, which are comprised of a title, a link for the full story, excerpt, date and time published and some other metadata. RSS documents are very easy to create using programming languages.

The words comprising the acronym RSS have change over the years since it was first created. Originally, it was called Rich Site Summary and was a format for sharing news headlines. RSS was originally developed by Netscape, back when the company provided the most popular web browser in use. As the standard evolved over time and became more associated with weblogs, it began to be called Really Simple Syndication, which is the meaning the acronym usually carries today.

RSS files, or feeds as they are often called, are not intended to be read directly by a human: the standard XML tags they use make them ideal for being read by software programs. The original intent when Netscape created it was to provide a simple method by which news headlines could be republished by numerous other sites. One web site could simply grab the RSS feed from another and then display the headlines with links back to the original story. The programming required to generate and then use an RSS feed is usually not complex, which is what inspired the ‘simple’ part of the acronym.

The popularity of RSS exploded along with weblogs. Most blogging software and services generate RSS feeds automatically and as more and more people read blogs they began to use newsreaders to subscribe to them. A newsreader allows a person to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds and then read them all within a single application. For example, my own newsreader has around 200 subscribed feeds in it. It will go out and check each feed on the hour and alert me to new entries. This allows me to easily scan updates to over 200 web sites in the amount of time it would have taken to manual browse just a few of them. For heavy web users, using a newsreader transforms your web experience.

RSS is also a critical component of podcasting, the latest wave of self-publishing to hit the Web. Podcasting exploded upon the scene when a little used feature of RSS feeds, enclosures, was put to work delivering audio files. While there has been a bit of a spat over who invented the idea, both Dave Winer and Adam Curry were involved in creating some of the early podcasts. A podcast is an audio show, similar to independent radio, except that you may subscribe to a show’s RSS feed and have the audio files delivered right to your desktop. Many people will load the audio onto their iPods, or other portable media player, and listen to them on the go. Apple added podcasting support to their iTunes product in 2005, which has grown the podcasting audience greatly. It is also possible to enclose video files in an RSS feed as well, which has lead to people creating video blogs, or vlogs. In theory, you could add Word documents as feed enclosures if you wanted to.

Why is RSS Important?
RSS is poised to break into the mainstream. Major news sites, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post provide RSS feeds for much of their content. Not coincidentally, the major portal web sites provide the ability to subscribe to and track RSS feeds on their sites. There are also services such as Newsgator and Bloglines that provide web-based services for tracking feeds. It is an area with great energy and innovation currently.

Despite having numerous benefits for syndicating content and updates, RSS has one more thing going for it that will ensure it continues to spread: Microsoft. The next version of Microsoft’s operating system, Vista, will have RSS support built into it. While a complete picture of how this will be done has yet to emerge, it is clear that Internet Explorer and Outlook will both support subscribing to RSS feeds from within the application. In fact, the IE7 team has adopted an open source icon for RSS feeds, similar to what Firefox, the open source browser, already uses in its interface. Future version of Outlook will use the same icon as well.

Given that Microsoft will be baking RSS support directly into its products and operating system, associations should begin to experiment with the format and see how they can use it to provide enhanced services to their members as well as internally for staff.

Given the current trends, RSS is here to stay and will continue to grow in importance.

Current Uses by Associations
In late 2005, Boxwood Technologies integrated RSS feeds into its flagship web-based job board service. You can now easily subscribe to RSS feeds for all jobs on a job board or for the results of a particular search. While Boxwood rolled out this service rather quietly, I see it as a harbinger of eventual RSS support throughout the association software and services space.

Association Forum utilizes RSS for its blogging and podcasting efforts started in the last few years. The ‘View from a Corner Office’ blog has an RSS feed that contains a brief excerpt of each entry and Gary Labranch’s podcast is conveyed via RSS as well.

The Chicago-based American Library Association provides RSS feeds with their ALA TechSource blog. Teresa Koltzenberg, Editor, ALA Techsource, says “I decided to utilize RSS mainly because it is integral to the weblog technology/publishing tool, though, I do see the greater value of being able to push new content out to users as opposed to forcing them to come back to a site or page that has nothing new to offer them.�?

Future Potential
I believe that the potential of RSS as a communication and productivity tool is just beginning to be fully explored. In addition to continuing to use it share and raise awareness of web-based content, I believe that RSS can be put to use in strengthening the relationship between a member and her association.

One use specific to the association market is around increasing member awareness. Take the common scenario of an association staffer who manages a committee or board and serves as an ex officio member of the group. What if your association management system provided an RSS feed for each member, providing updates every time something new happens with that member. You could then subscribe to the feed of each member on the committee and be immediately updated when they register for a conference, renew their membership, buy a product or miss an important continuing education deadline. Imagine the value of being fully aware of your committee members’ individual interactions with the association in a way that comes directly to your desktop rather than you having to mine your AMS on a daily basis to find the same information.

The same kind of feed could be exposed to your members, secured with their user name and password. This feed could alert them when a product they purchased from you ships, deadlines to renew membership or continuing education credits, etc. This would allow them to be much more aware of what your association is doing for them on a daily basis without having to take overt steps to find it out.

This kind of awareness raising could improve the experience for everyone in the association by making better use of the data that flows through your systems on a daily basis to strengthen the relationship between members and the association.

Conclusion
RSS has practical applications for today and great potential to be a powerful relationship building tool in the future. As RSS achieves ubiquity, saying you get your news via RSS will be as common as saying you read the Web via HTTP: the technology will pervade much of what we do online but will be transparent to the people using our sites and services.

High Context Consulting, LLC

RSS for Associations

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