Plumbing for the social internet. Using feeds you can seamlessly connect together many different on-line tools and let content flow between them.

Complexity: 2/5

Many websites and online services provide, or take in, RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a computer-readable version of the content on a website, or from an online service - divided up into individual items of content. Those items of content could be news stories, twitter messages, search results, photos, or just about anything else you can think of.

The video below explains how RSS can be used by individuals to keep to date with content from many different websites, pulling the content together in an RSS reader.

However, reading news is not the only way RSS can be used. RSS has many more applications.

Understanding RSS is key to understanding how the modern internet works. When you understand how to connect up different online tools you can start thinking about the best tool for each individual job you want to carry out (e.g. publishing text / sharing content / getting feedback / keeping up to date / publishing video) and then connecting them together. The presentation below outlines some of the many ways in which RSS can be used…

If you want to use RSS to keep up-to-date with content from across the web then take a look at the listening dashboard guide, or explore Google Reader, mentioned in the Commoncraft video above.

If you are interested in a wider exploration of RSS then look to see if websites and online services you use regularly output, or take in, RSS. Look for an RSS icon, or test talking about the RSS feed from the website. A selection of common icons are shown below. ATOM is similar to RSS, and in most cases is interchangeable with it.

Once you've found an RSS feed, copy the address of the feed, and paste it into a tool which can take in RSS.

Once you've set up a connection between two websites or online tools using RSS then it really runs itself. As long as both websites/online services keep running, content will regularly be pulled from one to the other.

Sometimes you can't find exactly the content you want in a single RSS feed, or the site you want to get content from doesn't yet provide an RSS feed. That's where advanced tools like Yahoo Pipes and Dapper come into play.

Sometimes you want to combine two RSS feeds, filter an RSS feed for certain key words, or combine, filter and sort RSS feeds. That is where Yahoo Pipes comes in. Yahoo Pipes is a very powerful, and user-friendly tool which can sit between websites or services producing RSS, and those that take in RSS. You can feed content from an RSS feed into Yahoo Pipes where it is processed and manipulated, before coming out as RSS again the other end.

Yahoo Pipes has a simple drag-and-drop interface. Visit the Yahoo Pipes site to get started.

Sometimes a side doesn't provide an RSS feed - but you would like to be able to link it's content into other online sites and services. Providing the content of a web page is well structured, then Open Dapper can turn it into an RSS feed, splitting up items from a page, and adding new items to the RSS feed when they are added to the website.

See Open Dapper for more.

• Advanced Yahoo Pipes - Tony Hirst has shared an extensive range of advanced Yahoo Pipes tips on the OUseful Blog