I have had a few discussions lately with people about RRS Feeds and how great they are. The funny thing I find though is that most people don’t know anything about them. My entire world is wrapped around RSS Feeds because this helps me stay in touch with topics that interest me without having to visit hundreds of websites everyday and search for interesting articles etc. I guess it is at time like these that I must remember that not everyone spends all day, every day on the internet.

So here it is… a breakdown of RSS and how it can help you.

Really Simple Subscription

RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Subscription’! The idea is that any website that has an RSS feed can send you articles and news without you even going to their website. This saves you time and effort.

The Benefit of using RSS (Web Feeds)

Web feeds have some advantages compared to receiving frequently published content via email:

• When subscribing to a feed, users do not disclose their email address, so users are not increasing their exposure to threats associated with email: spam, viruses, phishing, and identity theft.
• If users want to stop receiving news, they do not have to send an “unsubscribe” request; users can simply remove the feed from their aggregator.
• The feed items are automatically “sorted” in the sense that each feed URL has its own sets of entries (unlike an email box, where all mails are in one big pile and email programs have to resort to complicated rules and pattern matching). (Wikipedia)

One of the best articles I have found on the internet that describes RSS in the simplest manner is available on About.com here.