Feed me, feed me

To get the boring bit out of the way, RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. Not a very interesting or simple-sounding name. Nor does Wikipedia manage to make it sound any more appealing: 'RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication.'

Your personal newspaper

To make it simple: what RSS basically does is turn the internet into your own, personal newspaper. You no longer have to visit dozens of different sites to read news, sport, film reviews and so on. RSS collects it all automatically and sends it to you.

You can create and read your personal collection of RSS feeds in a number of different ways. It could be with a computer programme such as Microsoft Outlook. It could be through a website, such as Google Reader or AME Info MediaCentre. There are also RSS readers for mobile phones and PDAs.

Adding the content you want is easy. Many RSS readers have lists of popular feeds that you can select. You can visit a site you enjoy reading and look for a link or button (often orange) that says: 'RSS' or 'XML'. Look to your left now, and in the links column you should see 'RSS News Feeds' and an orange XML button. Click it, and the feed (in this case all new news on AME Info) is added to your collection. You can even search for and create your own feeds.

Finding your feeds

Websites tend to offer multiple feeds, meaning you don't have to be delivered all their content: only the specific sections that you want. You could choose to get all the sports news on the BBC website, or just the cricket news, or just the county cricket news, or just the Surrey county cricket news.

The drawback, or at least the obstacle to rapid RSS adoption, is that it does require at least a few minutes of your time to create a feed collection. Many people just can't be bothered with this initial set up, any more than they bother to customise their Google or Yahoo or MSN start page (also a kind of RSS reader).

Worth the effort

Which means that every day they have to skim again past the news stories that aren't of interest, (possibly missing a few that are if their headlines are misleading). Clicking and scrolling and loading slow pages, and accessing masses of different sites. Instead of just letting it all arrive automatically.

RSS is free, flexible and powerful. As an example, the custom Google feed: http://news.google.com/news?q=shakira&output=rss would automatically search all of Google's 4,500 news sources and deliver every recent article mentioning Shakira. Try visiting those 4,500 sites manually.