Since the recent rise in interest in RSS there has been a slew of RSS sites and RSS software. RSS has been proclaimed as the next big thing. There has been many wild claims about the benefits of publishing an RSS feed such as it will generate floods of traffic to your website.

If you have never heard of RSS publishing then you might want to take a look at this RSS Publishing FAQ to get yourself up to speed. More and more webmasters are starting to publish an RSS feed, those of you who are bloggers will be lucky enough to have RSS publishing capabilities built into their blogging software. The rest of us will have to rely on third party software.

The amount of RSS publishing applications has grown recently due to the demand from users needing simple to use software. You can of course edit an RSS file in a text editor which is relatively straight forward but time consuming. This is the reason that most webmasters need RSS publishing software, most webmasters want to be able to publish an RSS feed with has little hassle as possible.

There are a number of applications that I am aware of and I have listed them for you at http://newsniche.com/rss-publishing-tools.asp. Most of the titles I have seen are free and this is a good way to familiarise yourself with RSS publishing and test out the benefits of having an RSS feed.

All of these applications are great except for one thing. Publishing an RSS feed means using another piece of software where you need to cut and paste your content for it to be published. Do not get me wrong, this additional software is a great time saver for webmasters, but what they really need is an application that is integrated into their existing web publishing software. I am sure this will happen soon for many of the major titles but it would be nice to see some independent software writers produce an all inclusive publishing system.

I realise that every webmaster has different needs so such a piece of RSS publishing software may not be for everyone but it would sure make RSS publishing a whole lot more attractive to webmasters. By the way if you are using such a piece of software or you are a programmer currently writing RSS publishing software then let me know at rss{at}newsniche{dot}com.

Allan is the webmaster at http://www.newsniche.com/ an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.