The basics of RSS date back 14 years ago – and the concept didn’t even barely catch on until 1999 or so when Netscape created their “RDF Site Summary” (RSS 0.9) – which lasted only four months until they updated and tweaked it into a: “Rich Site Summary.” (RSS 0.91) In a bit of oddness, one year later an independent and non-commercial working group updated RSS again, calling it… “RDF Site Summary” (RSS 1.0) The world moved on, and time flowed. Two whole years later a breakthrough came and the RSS that we know today–”Really Simple Syndication” (RSS 2.0) was born – and it’s the RSS the web 2.0-savvy generation knows and loves.

You can start the process of adding RSS feeds to your blog by looking for something called an RSS feed aggregator or reader. Adding RSS feeds to your blog is pretty simple, even for those unfamiliar with XML. The feed aggregator will collect RSS feeds collectrf and create a code that you can use to display these feeds on your blog. When these feeds are updated, your blog feed willself-update to fit the latest site or blog update.

The easiest way to get started is by trying out a trial version of an RSS feed reader or using a free version. Once you have your feed reader installed, you will want to begin looking for related feeds for when you begin adding RSS feeds to your blog. Try Yahoo News, Google News, and blog search engines to find topics that match your audience’s interests. RSS feeds can add fresh content successfully to any type of blog – you can add freelance projects, jobs, industry-related news, advice columns, horoscopes, press releases, and other up-to-the-minute content without doing any researching at all. The only researching you’ll need to do is find the websites that have an RSS newsfeed. How can you find out if the content is feed-ready? You need to look for the RSS newsfeed symbol, or find the link that says “syndicate this”.

When you select a given feed, choose for the website to send you to a page with XML code. Copy-and-paste the URL of this page into your aggregator. Your aggregator will then create a small piece of code that you can paste into your blog. Your blog will now always contain a new set of summaries and links will be generated by the RSS feed you added.

Adding content to your blog doesn’t have to be complicated, as you can see. You just need a little Web 2.0 know-how, some search skills, and a little help from some online friends. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your blog and choose some interesting topics that really stand out – blogs are meant to be unique. And remember, blogging is a publication that is always a work in progress – and the more focused it is, the more you cake it shine.

Blogging can be an incredibly rewarding activity. Some people start a blog to promote a business. Other people start a blog because they simply like the idea of having their own website and a blog is the easiest kind of website to start. Others blog because they have an agenda that they want to promote. Still others start blogs because they want to educate people about certain issues. Whatever your reason for blogging, there is one thing that all bloggers can agree on: finding content can be a big pain in the…you-know-where.

When you start blogging thinking of blog post topics will be easy. This is largely due to your level of enthusiasm over your new site. Most bloggers will write a few posts a day when they start out. As time goes on, however, finding things to blog about becomes more difficult. It is not unlike looking across the table at your husband and realizing that the funny story you were about to tell him is the same funny story you’ve told him fifty times and is probably bored with it.

So what do you do?

The first place we go when we need to find blogging content is the news. We look at headlines in our local area first to see if anything piques our interest. Sometimes an article or a topic will jump out at us and give us enough ideas that we’ll have a few days worth of content for our blogs. Sometimes it is just a passing fancy that we mention only once. If no local news seems fitting for our blog (this will depend largely on your blog’s niche), then we move on to national news and then world news.

If we don’t find any current events to write about, the next place we look when we need help with blogging is our own entertainment cache. What have we been playing with lately? What books are we reading? Did we just see a movie that we can write about? Remember, blogging is about sharing opinions. Your readers want to know what you think about something even if it is just about a television show that was on last night.

If we still can’t think of any blogging material, we call our friends. Sometimes having a conversation with a friend will remind us of a topic we wanted to cover. Sometimes we’ll have such a great conversation that the conversation itself will become the topic of our blog post. Sometimes our friends will alert us to something that we think would work well for content.

Sometimes, in lieu of blogging original words, we’ll start blogging original visuals. Blogs are a great place to display photos from your recent vacation (you’ve probably been meaning to post them anyway) or a quick sketch you did. If you draw cartoons, your blog is a great method of distributing those cartoons to the public!

Finally, if all else fails you can always write a blog post about having nothing to blog about. It probably isn’t a good idea to do this too often, though!

For more information on blogging, visit http://www.microbloggingsites.com and http://www.microbloggingtool.com.