What Is An RSS Aggregator?

“What is an RSS aggregator?”After :

That’s a good question, and here’s the answer…

An RSS aggregator takes information from your blog feed and displays a portion of your blog feed in reverse-chronological order.

What is a blog feed?

A blog feed is a machine readable version of posts on your blog. Feeds are usually described by an XML-based file, but can also be in other formats. The feed can easily be interpreted by a feed aggregator that then allows other people to publish (syndicate) the content of the feed on other websites.

For an example of an RSS aggregator in action check out the squidoo page I made for my wife’s american idol blog:

http://www.squidoo.com/americanidolblog/

Scroll down to where it says: “American Idol On Our TV’s latest Posts”

The entries under that heading are taken from the feed of her American idol blog. It takes the most recent 7 posts from her blog and displays a portion of each post along with a link to the post in reverse chronological order.

In other words, a blog feed is a special file on your blog that contains a copy of your recent blog posts. An RSS aggregator takes the recent blog posts from your blog feed and displays them on another website.