Galveston.com & Company is happy to offer Galveston RSS, a state-of-the-art, cutting edge technology that is sweeping the internet and promising to revolutionize the way you obtain information.

Galveston.com now makes its tourism-related headlines and events available via RSS feeds to facilitate reading our stories via news aggregators.

Depending on who you ask, RSS stands for either "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication." But no matter what it's called, RSS is a new way to publish information online.

At the heart of the technology is special Web coding, called XML, that has been widely developed by the global online community over the past few years.

The XML code for RSS describes a new type of Web information called a "news feed." Essentially, the feeds can contain a summary and links of the new content on a Web site or anything else a creator desires to share. A company may publish an RSS feed that contains news of its latest products, for example.

Anyone - an online surfer or another Web site - can pick up the RSS codes and with the appropriate Web software display the information automatically.

The concept is similar to how a newswire service operates: Information published by one news organization can be "syndicated" - picked up and displayed - by any other news organization.

For Web surfers, the advantages of RSS are quite simple: They save time and bandwidth.

Instead of remembering to visit a favorite Web site, the news comes directly into your computer daily or at whatever interval you want.

What's more, most RSS feeds contain just links, headlines, or brief synopsis of new information only. That means the small amount of Web data can be sent to any XML-compatible device - a cell phone, pager, or handheld computer - without a lengthy download process.

More importantly, RSS gives you control over receiving information you want without revealing information about yourself. Unlike subscribing to an e-mail newsletter, you never have to give out your e-mail address with an RSS feed. That avoids the possibility of receiving spam or unwanted junk e-mail from the Web site.