If you have never seen, what should be, that familiar little orange square icon that represents an RSS feed, you have probably lived a subterranean life for the last decade and a half. Either that or you pulled a Rip Van Winkle. For those who remain unfamiliar with RSS feeds, or have seen the common RSS icon but still have no clue what it is about, here is a bit of useful information about then.
The roots of RSS news feeds date all the way back to the mid 1990s, and by the late 1990s, news feeds RSS were making it fast and convenient for both online publishers and web users to syndicate and access the latest news. When web users download the software for a free news RSS feed reader, which is also known as an RSS aggregator, they can receive instantly all updates from any of the feeds to which they subscribe. It does not take a brain surgeon, rocket scientist, or can collector to understand the benefits of obtaining all of your news and information updates from a single central location.
In order to subscribe to specific RSS news feeds, web users have two basic options; they can go to each of their favorite websites to subscribe, or they can select them from one of the several RSS news feeds lists that are available for free online. For those who are smart enough to have chosen the latter option, RSS feed lists will include, you guessed it, a list of all of the most popular RSS feeds. Using that list, web users can subscribe to any of the RSS feeds he or she so chooses. Basically, subscribing to an RSS feed can be thought of as subscribing to a channel.
Once the RSS reader or aggregator has been downloaded and feeds subscribed to, web users just go about their business as usual, until the feeds start coming through. As such, once a web publisher decides to update a news story or other information, he or she can syndicate such information instantly, and it will be sent to the RSS aggregators of each of their subscribers.