The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web.  To geeks like the Webmaster and other technical bods that means something special but to everyday folks like you and me the response might be "So what"?

So in order to make RSS much easier to understand, think of RSS as “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

Suppose you have 50 sites and blogs that you like to visit regularly. Going to visit each website and blog everyday could take you hours. With RSS, you can “subscribe” to a website or blog, and get “feed” all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites and blogs in one list, and see what’s going on in minutes instead of hours. What a time saver!

That one place where your RSS list is created is called an RSS Reader and it gathers all the headlines from all the websites and blogs to which you have subscribed. In a moment, I will describe how to get an RSS Reader.

Subscribing to RSS feeds - to “subscribe” to a website or blog’s RSS feed simply means that you are telling that website or blog, “Yes please, send me your story headlines.” It’s like subscribing to a magazine or newsletter. Instead of getting a magazine or email, you will just get a list of headlines sent to your RSS reader. If the headline looks interesting to you, all you have to do is click on the headline and you’ll be sent to the whole story. It's a bit like looking at the covers of magazines in a newsagents shop.

In order to subscribe to a website or blog’s RSS, all you have to do is click on an RSS symbol like one of those shown in the diagram at the bottom left of this page, or a text link of words something like “Subscribe to our RSS feed” on the website or blog. Typically, you can find these RSS symbols or text links in your browser window, on the sides of the website page, or on the bottom of the page. The publishers of the websites and blogs really want people to subscribe to their RSS, so they will make it very easy for you to find the subscription links.

RSS Readers - Now, because nothing is ever standard on the web like dealing with different operating systems, Mac vs. PC, and different flavored browsers like Internet Explorer, AOL, Safari, and Firefox, the way to get an RSS reader will be dependent on what browser you like to use, and how accessible you’d like your RSS list(s) to be.

Just like there are flavors of web browsers, you may see and hear of different flavors of RSS XML feeders like RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom. Again, the flavors are only important if you want to get technical. If you stick to looking for an RSS symbol like I have shown you on this page you will be just fine. Nevertheless I can tell you that this website uses RSS 2 for simplicity and compatibility.

If you’d like your RSS list to be accessible from any computer or mobile device you may have like a PDA, laptop or mobile phone, some popular RSS readers include (and almost all are FREE):

MyYahoo
MyMSN
MyAOL
MyGoogle
Bloglines

RSS as Live Bookmarks - Browsers like Safari and Firefox allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds through the browser and it’s called “live bookmarking”. Currently, you can only do live bookmarking in Internet Explorer if you have IE7 or above and to be honest, this is not the best browser for surfing or RSS feeds. Firefox is much better and reliable.

The limitation with using RSS in live bookmark form is that you only have access to your RSS list from the computer on which you created the bookmarks. If you want the flexibility of complete accessibility then I recommend going via the RSS Reader route.

I recommend the Google RSS Gadget which is what I use and it keeps me up to date with websites in which I am continually interested. It is also accessible from any internet access point so you don't need to be at home or even on your own computer to stay up to date. However, it does require you to have an iGoogle account but this is well worth the trouble because it gives you permanent on-screen access to currency conversion, language translation, weather reports, latest news items, webcams (I like to see my holiday place in Spain), a dictionary and even Google Chat - not forgetting the famous Google search engine.