I could cop out here and just point you to the Wikipedia entry, but I figure that the kind of people who like to look stuff up in Wikipedia are the kind who already have an arm-waving acquaintance with RSS. So here’s the short definition: RSS is a format for storing online information in a way that makes that information readable by lots of different kinds of software. An RSS page looks like this; links to RSS feeds are often displayed as or or . You may also hear about XML or Atom; Atom and RSS are both particular types of XML files (XML is the broad standard that makes online information easy to share across different browsers, programs or operating systems).

How does it work?

RSS simplifies the process of delivering new content to websites and users alike. Bloggers, news sites, and many other online sources publish their content to RSS 'feeds'. Then readers (that's you & me) can then use their web-browser or a separate program called a 'news-reader' to subscribe to RSS feeds from their favourite sites. It's kind of like bookmarking a page, except that the bookmark is smart enough to alert you whenever there's new content on the site.

Websites can use this same technology to re-publish content onto their own site, too. For example, if you maintained a website that was all about skiing, you could subscribe to the RSS feeds of snow reports for a bunch of local mountains, and have that information automatically pop up on your site.

Reprinted with permission from RSStocracy, by Alexandra Samuel and the Aggregation page on NetSquared.