RSS is an acronym used for describing the process of content syndication via the Internet.
Rather than try to explain the concepts, I’ve grabbed a video that does a great job of visually showing how RSS works and its benefits for you.
Check it out: RSS in Plain English
If you watched the video, you should have a good idea for how RSS works.
REAL-WORLD RSS EXAMPLE
Here’s another quick example in real-world terms for how RSS works: Imagine you like to read about the news in your town. Every morning, you could walk downtown, buy a newspaper from store and then return home with it to read it during your morning coffee.
Or you could subscribe to home-delivery of the paper. If you subscribe to home-delivery, you never have to leave your home to get the day’s newspaper.
Now, think about the delivery service that chucks the paper at your front door as RSS and think of a RSS reader as your home.
By using an RSS reader, you can have content delivered to you and you don’t have to visit a number of sites to discover whether or not new content has been created for you.
STEP 1: FIND YOUR FEEDS
The first thing to do is to open the sites you most regularly visit. Look for the orange RSS icon and click them. Next, copy down the RSS feed addresses of the sites you’d like to put in your reader.
Examples of an RSS feed:
STEP 2: USING A READER
I’ve found another video for you to help you learn how to get started using an RSS reader. My favorite reader happens to be made by Google, aptly named Google Reader.
All you need is a Google account (they’re free!) and to visit http://www.google.com/reader.
Here’s the video: Google Reader in Plain English
OTHER PLACES TO USE FEEDS
If Google reader isn’t your thing, you can also subscribe to feeds using Google homepage (http://www.google.com/ig), your social networking profiles and even your mail program, such as Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook.
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You can also use friendfeed to take several rss feeds you want to keep an eye on (like in google reader) but do an auto filter on those items based on maybe your niche keywords. This essential gives you a mix between google reader and google alerts all in one place…