Back in college, I told one of my friends about a movie review website I had come across that she might like. Neat, she told me. I will add it to my movie RSS feed! RSS feed? What are RSS feeds? It was not until many months later that I started to understand what an RSS feed was, and why it was useful to other online users.

An RSS feed is basically a web application that aggregates constantly updating material from a number of different sites, and presents this information in a unified format. It sounds complicated, but in reality is pretty simple. Imagine you follow eight websites or blogs that update with information about your favorite movies. They all update at different times of the day and days of the week, however, and you do not want to miss an update or have to look at each site several times a day.

Instead, you can use an RSS feed. Once you add all the urls to your RSS feed list, all you have to do is check your RSS to see which sites have updated, and what they updated about. In this way, RSS feeds help people keep their information organized, and allows them to make sure they receive quick updates about the things they care about.

There are many popular RSS feeds you might be familiar with, especially because they are often used by big name websites in order to display their most up to date information for viewers. The Reuters RSS and Yahoo News RSS would be examples of popular RSS feeds.

It is easy to find RSS feeds you are interested in just by doing a quick web search, or looking to see what your favorite websites are offering. Many popular RSS feeds are found this way.