As your webmaster will tell you, RSS-enabled web pages, newsletters and the like are for many, supplanting e-mail as the preferred medium for web communications.

Joe Dysart

The reason? RSS — or Really Simple Syndication. It enables you to bypass all the spam problems associated with e-mail, and read only what you want to read, using an RSS Reader.

Fortunately, getting up-to-speed on RSS and adding it to your institution's communication mix is very easy.

For example, there are dozens of free RSS readers available. Omea Reader is a good one. Portal sites like My Yahoo! offer RSS-tracking as well. Microsoft is even getting into the game, promising to include an RSS reader with the next version of Outlook Express, promised for release in 2007 under the new name, "Windows Live Mail Center."

If you know how to work an e-mail reader, you can become proficient with an RSS Reader very quickly. Both display messages in similar ways. The primary operational difference is that an RSS reader offers many more options for organizing messages.

RSS-enabling your institution's web pages - so that RSS users can automatically receive your institution's newsletters, marketing messages, and the like — is easy, too. There are a number of free web services that automate the process of RSS-enabling web pages. IceRocket is a good one. Follow IceRocket's prompts, and you'll be able to RSS-enable any page on your web site in about five minutes.

You'll also want to spend some time making sure your RSS-enabled pages are picked up by all the major RSS news aggregators. Those include Syndic8, Feedster and News Is Free.

For more info on RSS, check out: "RSS: What it is, Where to get it, How to make it," and "RSS: Your Gateway to News & Blog Content" by Danny Sullivan.

Joe Dysart is an internet speaker and business consultant based in Thousand Oaks, California. Reach him  by e-mail at joe@joedysart.com.