These are questions I am frequently asked: what is RSS and what is the difference between RSS and a blog. The answer is not as easy as you might think, but there is a fundamental difference.

RSS stands for a number of different things, depending on what you read, but the popular version is “Really Simple Syndication”. It is actually short for ‘Rich Site Summary’ and is an XML format used to share content such as items of news between different web sites. It allows you to provide fresh ever-changing content on your website that refreshes itself even while you sleep.

The word ‘syndication’ with reference to websites refers to the publication of an item to many other sites at the same time, which is probably where the popular version of the term arose. Using RSS, a website can let other web sites publish permitted content by posting a link to an RSS feed that the content they distribute can be read by other users using an RSS reader. So what’s the difference between RSS and a blog?

In fact originally, RSS feeds came from blogs, and still accompany them in many instances. However, they are merely extensions of blogs, but are a different medium altogether. If you consider a blog, it is a single web page that is a log of a website, in the same way that captain of a ship maintains a log of the goings on in the ship and its course on a daily basis.