A portable chunk of code that users can install and execute within any separate HTML-based Web page without requiring additional compilation.
Source: Wikipedia
Having an effective presence on the Web is no longer as simple as putting up a home page and letting visitors do all the work to come to you. Many organizations now enhance their Web-based communications with various techniques to push news and fresh information out to interested recipients or seed links to the updates in places people frequent online.
Many government agencies have been dabbling with these Web 2.0 tools for some simple tasks, such as sending occasional press releases. Now, taking a cue from some pioneering private-sector firms and a thriving interactive Web community, some agencies are looking at the tools as a way to conduct more frequent, and at times more critical, information exchanges with other agencies and groups and individuals outside government.
One of the most basic and important of these new tools is called Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way of formatting Web content using Extensible Markup Language so it can be read and used by many different programs. RSS reader or aggregator software can automatically grab this content from many Web sites and display it so users don’t have to go to each site to view it.
The Homeland Security Department is using RSS feeds from a number of its agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to automatically provide current information about floods, storms and other threats on its Disaster Help site.
“Another area we have been looking at is using RSS with widgets,” said Gwynne Kostin, director of Web communications at DHS. “It doesn’t take much for us to take an RSS feed and put it into a widget so that others can embed that into their own Web sites.”
Widgets are snippets of HTML code that are inserted into the programming that organizations use to build their Web sites. Those widgets then bring live content from home sites to the Web page that hosts the widget. One popular widget allows YouTube videos to be displayed on Web sites outside the YouTube site.
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