For more info on RSS, check out my page on XML at http://www.granneman.com/usefulli/developm/coding/xml/. Scroll down to the RSS sections.

Here's the short answer: There's some debate, but most people say that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's an implementation of XML designed for creating content that is supposed to be syndicated (or subscribed to) and for reading syndicated content.

If you want to see RSS in action, go to my blog at http://radio.weblogs.com/0100530/ and then click on the orange XML button on the right side of the page. Even better, right click on the XML button, save the file, & open it in a text editor. If you had an RSS aggregator, you could subscribe to my RSS feed. Every so often, your aggregator would poll my RSS feed to see if there were updates. If there were, it would grab them and display them to me. I can then click on the headline to read more.

Note that you can just subscribe to a category of mine. Further down on the right side is a list of all my categories. Click one. Note the XML button on the new page. You can subscribe to just that RSS feed, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed that gives all the Granneman goodness.

I use a program in Windows (it's one of the reasons I keep a Windows machine around ... the other is Unreal Tournament) called Radio that both allows me to blog and thereby create RSS feeds automatically, and also aggregates RSS feeds for me to read. It has completely changed how I gather 'news' now. I've unsubbed from many email newsletters to instead gather their info in RSS. In fact, if a site doesn't offer an RSS feed, I pretty much ignore it now.

You can work with RSS on any platform, using a wide array of tools & languages. For more on that, see the page I referenced in the beginning of this email. In particular, check out NewsIsFree, which has 1000s of RSS feeds you can subscribe to. In addition, you can aggregate those RSS feeds using NewsIsFree as well ... you can read the resulting Web pages there, or it will email you the list when you want.

RSS is big and it is only growing. More and more people are using it and coming to rely on it for the gathering of information. It's a great tool, and it has truly changed my use of the Net.