For those of you unfamiliar with RSS you no doubt will have seen the standard RSS button 
on web sites and wondered what is was. RSS is essentially an internet web feed format designed to share web content such as blogs, news, audio, video and a variety of other on-line content. RSS mostly stands for "Really Simple Syndication" but is sometimes referred to as "Rich Site Summary". In this article I would like to take a closer look at RSS, what it does, and how it can help those in the semi finished plastic business or any other business for that matter.
The typical internet user may have several sites or more that they frequent for their content. They may visit Yahoo News, CNN and The Wall Street Journal for current events. They may also visit several entertainment or personal interest sites like PGA.COM or MLB.COM in addition to trade related sites like iPlastic.com. This ad hock method of information retrieval is very inefficient and can be quite time consuming.
RSS offers people a way to aggregate the content from all the sites they visit so they can save time by not having to visit each site individually in order to get the information they need. All their content is made available in one location by way of a "feed reader" or "aggregator". There are several popular feed readers on the market and most are free. Newsgator has feed reader products for your desktop and for your mobile device that work really well. Also very popular are the free feed readers provided by Google and Yahoo.
To be able to view content from your favorite site in a feed reader or news reader the publishing site must "syndicate" their content. All the sites I mentioned above provide RSS feeds or "syndicate" much of their content. Look for the RSS symbol as it usually provides a link to an RSS feed and is a sure sign that RSS feeds are available.
At iPlastic we provide several RSS feeds of our content including the iPlastic Blog, iPlastic Exchange and our Industry Events Calendar. We plan to add more industry related RSS links as we receive them. Our iPlastic Exchange feed contains the very latest excess inventory opportunities you will not want to miss. All iPlastic RSS feeds can be found on our RSS Feeds page.
If you are new to RSS consider giving it a try and begin to enjoy the time saving benefits RSS has to offer. If you already take advantage of RSS please subscribe to one or more of our feeds today!