RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content.
Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate
their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to
easily stay informed by retrieving summaries of the latest content from the sites you are interested in.
You
save time by not needing to visit each site individually.
The number of
sites offering RSS feeds
is growing rapidly and includes big names like
Yahoo News and
Amazon.com.
Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.
A
variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include
Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac),
FeedReader (Windows), and
NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook).
If you click on the button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways,
including by dragging the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader or
by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader.
Most sites that offer RSS feeds use a similar orange RSS button, but
some may just have a normal web link to the feed.
Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for RSS
feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one.
This can make subscribing to RSS feeds much easier. For more details on these,
please check their websites.