What Is RSS?
If you're unfamiliar with RSS feeds, my Making An RSS Feed sidebar article takes a close look at what exactly RSS is and how to create a feed. In short, RSS is a way for web site owners to let you know what new content they have available within their web sites. There are a wide-range of web sites that "syndicate" their content in this way. Among the top 100 most subscribed feeds reported by Radio UserLand (a news aggregator explained more below) are technology headlines from the New York Times, the daily Dilbert cartoon, PDABuzz.com and former MTV VJ Adam Curry's weblog. The beauty of these feeds means that you can effectively create your own custom newspaper or magazine of recent content. There are a number of news aggregators or RSS readers that allow you to subscribe to and read RSS feeds.
RSS can deliver current information from the Internet in our areas of expertise or interest.
RSS comes close to fulfilling the promise of a custom newspaper or magazine that is delivered to our desktops. My RSS reader delivers to my desktop a custom mix of articles on news, technology, the Law of Attraction, personal growth, web 2.0, website development, information technology... and of course, RSS.
I continually refine this daily flow of information, dropping those feeds that get stale, and picking up new feeds for current events like the Presidential Election.
Some RSS feeds are updated hourly (Associated Press and BBC news), some RSS feeds are updated daily, and others are updated weekly or irregularly. RSS reduces my web surfing time and gives me more reading time.
http://www.wizard-creek.com/rss/tutorial/rss-what-is-it-good-for.htm