Can you please explain RSS? I hear everyone talking about them, but I have no idea what they are!

I know–I just became informed myself, but an RSS feed isn’t as complicated as it seems.  RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” and just the abbreviation is probably what intimidates many of us.  But what an RSS feed does is really quite easy: it let’s you know when all their favorite sites have been updated. 

So, on the net, there are tons of different “readers” that you can use for your subscriptions.  See, you take a reader–an RSS feed reader–like Google Reader or Bloglines, and you add your favorite sites to this reader.  Since this reader is connected to all your favorite sites, it lets you when the site has been updated.  Now, you don’t have to check all your favorite sites; the reader gets updated instead.  It can be compared to subscribing to a magazine, but you subscribe instead to your favorite Internet sites.  For example, on my Google Reader I get all the most recent Reading Rants  book reviews when they have been updated.  I get my friend Roybot’s updated del.icio.us additions.  And, I get my favorite role model’s new searching techniques on the SLJ blog Neverending Search.

What really helped me understand the RSS feed (and finally get myself a reader) is this nifty video by Common Craft: http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english