RSS is a great way to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You also save time by not needing to visit each site individually. Wikipidea has more on Really Simple Syndication or RSS.

How do I start using RSS feeds?

The first thing you need is something called a news reader, feed reader or news aggregator. This is a piece of software that checks the feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications.

Two popular Windows based feed readers are Feedreader and Newsgator. There are also a number of web-based feed readers available including Google Reader, Bloglines or My Yahoo. Some browsers, including latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to feeds much easier. You can also choose to receive your RSS feeds via email.

Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites such as this one that syndicate their content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.

The icon looks like this:

Just click on this icon once you have set up your feed reader or directly if you are using a brower based reader.