It’s been far too long since I’ve allowed my geeky passion for RSS to spill forth.

As a reminder, let me say again – anything that throws off an RSS feed (oh, and that’s just about any online tool) presents some interesting republishing opportunities.

The republishing of RSS feeds for you own content creation purposes involves two steps 1) locate or generate the RSS feed, 2) produce the code to publish the feed as HTML somewhere.

Some example of RSS producers – blogs, online calenders, blog categories, and custom searches for starters.

So, let’s say you are way keen on all things to do with, I don’t know, referral marketing. You simply go to Google News and create a search for “referral marketing” (use the quotes) and copy the RSS feed URL. You can do the very same at search.twitter.com and capture the RSS feed for all tweets that contain that search term.

Or, let’s say you created a twitter #hashtag for an event, that’s right, a search for said hashtag produces an RSS feed and can be published as streaming content anywhere you can paste the code.

Producing the RSS feeds of course is only half of the equation in the republishing scheme. There are many ways to publish the RSS feeds, but here are two free and simple ways.

1) Widgetbox – simply take the RSS URL to widgetbox and create stylish widgets that can be massaged in many ways. (This tool deserves a full post as you can do some very cool things with widgets and gadgets.)

2) Feedburner – take your RSS URL to Feedburner and use a feature called BuzzBoost to produce the HTML for you – this service gives you full CSS styling capabilities if you care to create your own style.

Here’s an example of a widgetbox widget for the search referral marketing on twitter.

Let your imagination run wild with this one!