I am teaching a Web 2.0 class to parents at my school right now. We are working our way in a a weekly class through Blogs, Wikis, RSS, Podcasts and Social Bookmarking. Through one of my feeds Stephens’s Untold Stories, I this great post on the “Back in Skinny Jeans again” blog. The title is “How does Oprah define RSS?”.

The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, “Uh, I don’t get it?”

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

Complete Article

The post has great illustrations and well worth filing away and keeping it handy for professional development workshops.

I can still remember when I could not grasp and wrap my mind around the concept of RSS and tagging.  So the more analogies we can find, when teaching “non-techies” the better.

Posted: 22. September, 2006 at 7:13 am. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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