What is an RSS Feed and how can it help your Canadian Tourism business?

There is an awful lot of information out there in cyberspace about the Web 2.0 and its implications for tourism around the world. Web 2.0 refers to the interactive capabilities of the Internet to connect people with people, people with businesses and businesses with businesses. One small, but important element of this Web 2.0 environment is the RSS Feed. RSS stands for really simple syndication. An article on Wikipedia defines it as "RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts."
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Given our time constraints many of us want to find ways to be more productive and be more efficient. Many of us want or need to stay abreast of news and information that can help in our careers or businesses. RSS feeds are a great way to do this efficiently. First you need an RSS reader. I use Google Reader for its ease of use. All you need is to sign up (you will need to get a Google account which is easy to get). Once you have your Google Reader account then you can begin to add RSS Feeds to this Reader Webpage. I subscribe to over 60 RSS Feeds that I scan every morning for news or helpful articles.

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My Google Reader homepage. Newest blog posts or news (from newspaper feeds, for example) are featured in the centre of the page. On the left side is a list of all blogs, newspapers and other orgs' feeds I subscribe to with the number of new entries in parenthesis.

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Subscribing to feeds is also easy. For example if you want to subscribe to this blog, you just click on the link at the bottom that says "Subscribe to the Canadian Tourism Blog" or the one on the left of this page with the RSS icon. Once you click you will be taken to another webpage that looks like the following:

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All you need to do is copy the URL (internet address), go back to your Google Reader page click on the Add Subscription link, paste the URL and click on Add. Et voilá, you will be subscribed. Everytime you logon to your reader you will see if there are new entries on this blog. The RSS feeder is really only helpful if you want to subscribe and keep track of many blogs, newspapers or other organizations that use RSS, since the beauty of the technology is that you can have all of these in one place.

RSS feeds not only can be added to and RSS reader but now they can be added to many websites such as Facebook and other social networks like Canadamigos Network (www.canadamigos.com)

Next post: How can you make use of an RSS feed to market your product or service?

Cheers,

Jaime

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