Really Simple Syndication (RSS): Overview

Really Simple Syndication is a way for people who publish information on a website to offers a feed for other people to read so those readers don't have to continually return to the original website to read updates.

Most social media publishing applications (e.g. blogs) offer RSS feeds automatically. In other words, if you are using one of these Web-based tools, you won't have to worry about creating one. However, you will need to check to make sure your feed is working (but that's a bit more advanced and we'll get there later).

For those who just want to gather (i.e. aggregate) these feeds, you'll need to use a piece of software called an RSS Reader. For the purposes of this demonstration, we're going to use the Google Reader but you can search for RSS Reader and have any number of choices.