Firstly a video that explains RSS in the plain English:

Here is transcript of the above video modified:

The Internet has problems. Technorati says there are 50 million blogs, and you can see, it’s going up.

This is overwhelming.  You log on to your computer, and you’re looking for something new. so you go out to your favorite blogs. Is there anything new there? No.
You go out to your favorite news sites. Is there anything new?  No.  Every time you look for something new and its not there, you’ve wasted valuable time. This is the old way.

Now, let’s consider the new and fast way, which is simple and requires to turning things the other way round.  This means the new things from blogs and new things from your news sites come to you instead.

So, what we are talking about is using a single location that becomes your home for reading all the new stuff that is coming from your favorite websites delivered to you.
There are two steps to getting started:

The first step is you need a “home” for reading new posts.  This is a website called a reader. It is free and all you need is an account. I use a site called Google Reader, it looks like this:

My favorite sites are listed on the left and on the right I can scroll through all the new posts from my favorite sites in a single place. So, to complete step one you need to go sign up for a reader. Google Reader, Bloglines, Newsgator, shyftr and My Yahoo! are good places to start.

Step number two is to set up a connection between your reader and your favorite websites. Setting up these connections is called subscribing, and it’s really important.

Nearly every blog and news site offers the ability for you to subscribe so updates in these sites show up here in your reader.  To set up these subscriptions, you just need to look for funny little icons.  This is the standard one using the standard orange color:

You may also see these:

These little icons say, “Hey look! Subscribe to me! I can save you time!”  Once you find one of these buttons on your favourite site, click on it and the page that appears will give you everything you need for subscribing.  After you click that button, one of two types of pages will appear.  This is one that provides one click access to subscribing in your reader:

The other page you’re likely to see looks like this with code on it. If you see this page, copy the URL at the top of the page:

Go to your reader and look for a link that says “Add Subscription” or “Add Feed.” Click on that, and paste the address into your reader.

So, once you’ve added your subscriptions and the connection is there new posts begin arriving in your reader and you’ll see why this is the new, faster way to read the web.
So a quick recap.

• There are two things you need to do.
• Number one is go sign up for a reader.
• Number two, go to your favourite websites click on the icon and subscribe.

As an addition you will notice on this blog there is the ‘Subscribe by email’ option.  This works similar to the reader except the RSS feed posts are sent directly to your email inbox.  So those of you more inclined to reading emails and do not want use the reader method can easily just subscribe to this blog using the email option.

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