As with any WordPress Blog and pretty much any other blog or news website projectroon.co.uk has an RSS Feed and if you look closely at the source of this RSS feed you may notice a new element

<cloud>

What is this? Well currently most Feed Aggregators will poll selected RSS feeds and check if there are any new items. This can be slow and resource heavy especially for someone like Google who has to check millions of feeds many times every day with their reader technology

The cloud element has always been available in RSS 2.0 however most have ignored it or failed to appreciate its possible uses.

Anyone who is familiar with a Blackberry mobile phone will know just how much money they save in data charges by using the Blackberry’s Push technology. Push technology means that the phone doesn’t have to keep connecting to it’s mail server and asking if there are any new emails available. Instead the server waits until it has a new email and then contacts the phone to deliver it. This results in far less load on the mail server and means you don’t have to wait to receive your email.

The RSS cloud works in the same way, feed readers that support the cloud element will be informed every time a blog owner publishes a new post, meaning readers using that reader will be able to start reading instantly after posting.

Find out more from the Official Announcement by WordPress or add support for the RSS cloud for your wordpress blog here