RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The basic idea is that with sites like this one, we can provide content that is altered by a style sheet to look pretty, or left alone to look just basic, for printing perhaps.
An RSS Feed consists of text-only information that is delivered a number of ways without images or decoration. You may already have a Feed reader built into your browser. If so, you will probably see a small colored square in your browser bar that looks like the blue one above.
Who cares? Well, the convenience of RSS is that you can be kept up to date on things that you care about without having to go visit every single web page where the update happens. Even better, many sites have so much going on, you have a hard time figuring out what is ‘new’. RSS brings you all the new stuff automatically.
With a Feed reader, you can conveniently keep up to date on dozens of Blogs, News Stories and web sites like this one, from one place.
Firefox plugins have a number of options that help you to read RSS and a built in functionality too.
Internet Explorer 7 can manage RSS feeds for you
So can Opera, which combines it with their email component
There are also a number of standalone programs and even ways to incorporate feeds into your web page and blog, automatically updating you on topics of interest.
Soon, Faraday Media will release their second version of Particls which learns what you like and pay attention to from among all of your feeds, delivering the most relevant content to exactly what you like.
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