RSS is technology – a simple software program – that allows you to access web and blog content automatically. The acronym’s most popular translation is “Really Simple Syndication. Once your browser or computer has an RSS reader on board, you can subscribe to any number of RSS “feeds.” A feed is simply a way in which a reader may subscribe to website content – most commonly blogs or news sites. A news site, for example, may list their latest headlines or entire articles in their feed every time a new article is published. A blog would publish this feed as a series of recent posts.
Feeds are published by millions of publishers, from small individuals to large organizations like Newsweek. The value of a feed is that it brings the most current site content to you in a format that is easily scanned; further, you are spared the task of visiting each source site each day. This is typically done through the use of what is called an ‘aggregator’ or ‘feed reader’.
Feed readers or RSS readers, are software programs that run on your computer (or PDA or phone); let you easily subscribe to feeds, and allow you to...