What does RSS mean?

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

RSS is a family of XML file formats for Web syndication used by (among other things) news websites and weblogs. The abbreviation is used to refer to the following standards:

* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0.0)

The technology of RSS allows Internet users to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds; these are typically sites that change or add content regularly. To use this technology, site owners create or obtain specialized software (such as a content management system) which, in the machine-readable XML format, presents new articles in a list, giving a line or two of each article and a link to the full article or post. Unlike subscriptions to many printed newspapers and magazines, most RSS subscriptions are free.

The RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data. This information is delivered as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, RSS allows a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator.

Source(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file…

Answer 2

Really Simple Syndication = the most common answer.
A few other explanations:
1) Rich Site Summary
2) RDF Site Summary (Resource Description Framework)
3) Really Sweat Syndication (okay, I made that one up)

The Ironic part is that as simple as RSS is, the acronym is so obscure. But, I suppose it's easier then XML (which is how RSS works and is sometimes known as). XML stands for Extensible Markup Language.

Source(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

Answer 3

Really Simple Syndication - In lay mans terms you can use the RSS feeeds from different sites in a aggagator tool to display all those feeds in one single place