What Is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is (more-or-less) a method for publishing headlines.

At its simplest, and RSS feed (also called a newsfeed) contains a list of headlines, each with a title, a publication date, perhaps a summary, and a link to the main article.

Some example uses for RSS feeds:

Breaking news stories from a news website.
Summaries of new articles on a website or online magazine.
Stock news from a brokerage.
New releases from a software company.
Game scores from a sports website.

Many sites provide more than one RSS feed, normally focussing on a particular area (for example a news website might publish separate feeds for local, national, and international news).

In many ways, RSS feeds are similar to e-mail announcement lists, but with a few not-insignificant advantages:

The user does not need to subscribe or unsubscribe, and there's no problem if you change your e-mail address.
The user doesn't have to deal with e-mail messages, spam traps, etc.
For the publisher, there is no subscription list to maintain.

How to View RSS

To view RSS, you need an application that supports RSS feeds, commonly known as a feed aggregator or newsfeed reader. There are also websites which provide an equivalent web-based service.

Feed aggregators can monitor multiple RSS feeds and display them in a variety of useful ways, such as highlighting headlines with certain keywords.

There are number of applications out there supporting RSS, such as FeedDemon.