More and more sites are now providing RSS feeds of information from there sites. All you need to do is subscribe to that feed, its that simple. Once you are subscribed any new updates from that site will be collected for you by your RSS reader, all you have to do is read it. If you use an online reader such as Bloglines then you don't even have to wait until RSS feeds have been downloaded as Bloglines does all of downloading for you. All you need to do is log into your account.

Imagine how much time you will have saved. No more will you have to visit a website only to find that nothing has been updated. Imagine not having to trawl through large sites trying to find latest information. RSS can save you a serious amount of time that I am sure you would rather be spending developing content for your own site.

This has lead to what I consider improper use of RSS feeds to spam search engines, this seems to be aimed particularly at Google. Although not yet widespread yet many webmasters are cottoning on to fact that they can get easy content for their websites without putting in much effort. Although off hand this may not seem detrimental to you, consider long term consequences. Your feed copied hundreds if not thousands of times and no back links to your site as links have been stripped. What if Google decides to penalise due to duplicate content, consequences could be that your site is dropped from Googles listings.

After considering such a scenario I have come up with a few suggestions. Firstly only publish a teaser paragraph in your feed that links back to main article. Although some may disagree with me as they prefer full article in feed, I truly believe RSS is better suited to notification type messages. Secondly you can publish some terms in your feed which states that contents are personal use only and you should be contacted for syndication rights. While this will not stop those determined to copy content of your RSS feed it will help raise awareness of issue.