The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission publishes new
content on its website through an “RSS” feed, an Internet
format designating certain kinds of content on a website
–and part of a growing trend used by Internet blogs and
websites as more and more people begin using news
aggregators, which troll the web looking for RSS, to stay
on top of information.
People who want to be notified of updated content on the
EEOC website without having to go to the site and actually
check it, can subscribe to its RSS URL by cutting and
pasting it into a program such as Net News Wire, or Newz
Crawler, which regularly scan the web for new content and
drop a headline and description into an inbox when found.
The technology has been around for several years but is only
now being adopted by major publications such as Wired.
Internet blogs such as the popular Gawker website are XML
based and can be monitored with an aggregator.
“Right now RSS is going through a boom among technical types
but hasn’t yet caught on with the average Internet user, but
it will in six months or a year from now when there is going
to be a leap in the amount of use to where it becomes a
benefit to offer that feed,” says IT specialist and senior
web master for EEOC, Adam Guasch-Melendez.
The technology could be used by organizations to keep everybody
on the same page, though as for its usefulness right now, that
would depend on whether employees have readers, which are
inexpensive, simple to use and likely to catch on rapidly as
they are incorporated into future updates of web browsers and
as blogs take on a more prevalent role on the Internet.
