RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a technology that provides you with an easier way to get the latest news and updates from various websites and gives you more control over what you want to see or hear on the Internet.
RSS constantly scans the contents of your favourite websites or blogs and then broadcasts those updates to you through a feed. Through this method, frequently updated websites can easily syndicate their content, and web users can also get updated information from their favourite sites or blogs automatically served up on their desktops.
To implement RSS, creators of websites have to include RSS files on their sites, which will gather the updates.
When you subscribe to an RSS feed, RSS news aggregators - which can be downloaded onto your computer, PDA or phone - will automatically pick up the RSS files from the user-selected websites and display the updated content. Most aggregators will allow you to filter stories by topic, keywords and time. The information you want is thus “fed” to you as it is updated on the home site.
To subscribe to an RSS feed, you can sign up for one of the many FREE feeds online or download the RSS reader or news aggregator to your desktop, handheld or mobile phone.
Then look out for the RSS icons on the websites you visit. The more common icons are 
and 
. While there are a number of icon designs out there, they all mean the same thing – the availability of FREE syndicated content.
Clicking on an RSS icon leads you to a page with a list of available RSS content. For example, if you are a frequent viewer at Channel News Asia, you can get the latest headlines by clicking the RSS icon on the main page and selecting the sections that interest you most. Copy the URL of that section and paste it in your RSS feed. Click refresh and you are finished. Do the same with other websites to get ALL the news, gossips and updates you want sent to one place. No more wasted hours trawling through the Web – the content you seek is all right there in your RSS feed.
There is an abundance of information available on the Web today: news headlines, e-zines, blogs, product announcements, weather, financial updates, entertainment gossip … the list is endless. Despite the variety, you probably have a list of favourites that you visit regularly. Of course, the more you surf, the more you discover, and that means more sites to your growing list of must-visit places.
You could keep bookmarks of your favourites but after a while you will notice a list that seems to scroll on forever.
