You may have come across these funny looking little buttons and wondered what they are? This Webpage is an attempt to explain what they are and how you can use them to better enjoy the Web.
RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It is a way to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading.
Most people are interested in many websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. Examples of such websites are news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious. Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from multiple websites they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam. RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.
RSS works by having the website author maintain a list of notifications on their website in a standard way. This list of notifications is called an "RSS Feed". People who are interested in finding out the latest headlines or changes can check this list. Special computer programs called "RSS aggregators" have been developed that automatically access the RSS feeds of websites you care about on your behalf and organize the results for you. (RSS feeds and aggregators are also sometimes called "RSS Channels" and "RSS Readers".) Producing an RSS feed is very simple and hundreds of thousands of websites now provide this feature, including major news organizations like the New York Times, the BBC, and Reuters, as well as many weblogs.
I personally like Google desktop. You can get it Here
This is what it looks like
Just download and install it. Add my rss url (http://plong.acceleron.net/rss.xml) to it, and receive instant updates right to your desktop. Not only that, but you'll see that there is so many rss feeds out there. Your bound to find something that interests you enough to want up to the minutes updates.
Rocket RSS Reader a free web-based reader from the same company behind the Rocketnews news search engine. Subscribe to any of the hundreds of news or blog feeds categorized in the reader, add your own or create your own custom search-based feeds.
RSS-Feed is a web-based Rss-Reader, a online news aggregator. It allows you to create and publish your own news page and to build custom news feeds using your favorite RSS Feeds. Also exists in french. Very fast.
Bloglines is a free, web-based aggregator with all the features of desktop aggregator programs, but without the hassle of downloading and installing a program. Very popular. myFeedster is closely tied to the Feedster search engine. You can easily subscribe to blogs you find with any Feedster topic search. You can also import or export your subscriptions as OPML.
Feedexa is a free online service for subscribing, searching and tagging feeds, blogs and the like. Supports RSS, ATOM, OPML Import, RSS Autodiscovery plus much more. IzyNews - http://izynews.com - an e-mail rather than web service, works with many popular e-mail apps. Organizes feeds into a customizable folder hierarchy.