RSS from a User's Perspective
I often find interesting sites, I bookmark them, and forget about them. Then there are a few sites that I routinely visit. Even if I would remember all the interesting sites most of them aren't updated very often, so I would need to work myself through all the old stuff to see if I can find something new.
On a site offering an RSS feed I get this small RSS icon and I can copy he URL it's pointing to and paste it in my feed reader (or in my browser if it has a feed reader plug-in). I can also drag the RSS icon and drop it my feed reader or browser.
From then on I can just start my feed reader, and it will scan dozens, or hundreds of feeds for new fresh information. The process is very fast and the result is a list with headlines, descriptions and links to those pages containing new material.
If I want to, I can let my feed reader run in the background and get beeped the second something new is published!
RSS from a Content-Provider's Perspective
From a technical perspective, an RSS feed is a small data file (typically under 10KB) that a site makes available, which lists the most recent items at that site. The file is in a simple dialect of XML. The file is meant to be autogenerated from the rest of the site - say, from the site's content-management system, or by having a little program that just reads part of an HTML page and summarizes it in RSS.
By notifying people interested in your content, as well as Web sites that collect and package content announcements (called aggregators), you are "feeding" them your content – hence the term RSS feed.
Why RSS is Better Than E-mail Announcements
Just about everyone who publishes content online has some sort of e-mail announcement list. I do, too. Still, RSS is a great complement to e-mail announcements because it doesn't clutter people's in-boxes, it's easier to manage for recipients who get a lot of news online, it's spam-proof, and it's easier to manage than an e-mail list.
While not a lot of people know about RSS right now, it's getting popular quickly. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next couple of years RSS becomes as widely known and used as the Web and e-mail.
Using RSS
When you subscribe to a feed, you tell your feed reader that you want it to periodically poll a certain site's RSS feed file. To do this, just click on the cryptic little button that says something like "XML" or "RSS" that you see on so many sites today. That will take you to the rather cryptic feed file (if it uses a XSL style sheet it won't look cryptic at all). Then, simply grab the URL for that page and plug it into your feed reader. It's somewhat similar to bookmarking a page in your Web browser.
Then, when you want to read the news, you tell your feed reader to go out to the feeds you've subscribed to and grab their latest information. Then, your feed reader displays that information in a way that's similar to what you see on Google News -- a list of the latest headlines from each source, sorted however you prefer, sometimes with brief descriptions of the content, and always with a link to the full content on the publisher's site.
Bottom line
RSS is useful for both the user and the content provider, it's spam free and fast!
Click this icon to go to the GoLiveCentral.com RSS feed  Our feed uses an XSL style sheet so it's readable to humans.
If you want more information on how to set up your own RSS news feed you can read this basic tutorial in PDF format.
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