Until fairly recently I had no idea the purpose for it. About six months ago I found google reader and it is about the best tool in the world. You are able to keep track of many different sites via one friendly interface.
RSS in and of itself is just a standard for sharing content. It is a XML file that allow for publishers to share the content in an easy to use format. Most of the time these feeds as they are often called, are just a title and a short description of the story. It gives enough information to allow someone to know what they are looking at and if they want to continue reading they can click on a link.
To view RSS there are several different ways of going about it, the two most common are a web based tool and desktop based. I have heard great reviews of many desktop RSS readers, but my issue with them is that if you are reading from various locations you do not know what you have already seen. By using google reader it will keep track of what you have seen already. If you have around 60 feeds you keep track of, like myself, this comes in very handy.
In one of my previous posts I stated how I thought that social news web sites are not any good. With about 10 feeds you get get 90% of the decent articles that will hit the front page of sites like digg. The 10% that you miss is worth not seeing just because of the hassle of that site.
One of the best features about RSS is that most sites advertise the fact that they have this ability. In most modern browsers you will see a little orange icon in the browser next to the URL bar. When you click this icon it will either bring you to the RSS feed itself or will have a pulldown of different RSS feeds for the site. You can often get different RSS options in other places on the site, this site has quite a few options listed in the menu. The icons here are XML rather than RSS, play around with them to see what each of them do.
RSS is one of those things that most people ignore until they find out how much time they can save by using it. If you have never tried RSS before give it a try.
