Perhaps you’ve heard about RSS or you’ve seen the orange icon 
on many websites, blogs or forums. If you haven’t taken advantage of RSS feeds possibilities yet, perhaps it’s time you learn a little more about it.
RSS means “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a web feed format used to publish frequently updated content like blogs, forums, news headlines and podcasts.
As A Reader
An RSS feed allows you to read all your favorite news or blog posts from within a single interface called an RSS reader (or an RSS aggregator). This can be web-based or it can come as a software. There are plenty of free RSS reader in both web and software format. I tend to like web-based reader more cause you can access it from anywhere.
Here are a few web-based RSS readers:
And a few software-based readers:
Once you’ve chosen your RSS reader, you need to subscribe to a feed. Go to your favorite blog and look for the RSS feed icon . Click on it and copy the URL from the address bar to your clipboard (for example http://feeds.feedburner.com/thewebmasterscafe). Now let’s say you’re using Google Reader, log into your account at http://www.google.com/reader. Click on the “Add subscription” link.
Paste the feed URL into the text box and click on the “Add” button:
And now you can read all the blog posts from your online RSS reader:
As A Content Publisher
If you’ve got a blog or if you run a forum, you can publish a feed of your content. This allows you to gain regular readers and know them better by analyzing your feed’s stats. Syndication sites like Feedburner even gives you the opportunity to monetize your feed with Google AdSense.
RSS feeds are not only useful to content publishers. You could also use an RSS feed to publish your product catalog to your retailers for example.
December 14th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Another start page or RSS reader available is Odysen, http://www.odysen.com. It includes widgets, multiple pages, and social networking features.
Specifically for RSS readers, the reader allows you to: integrate multiple feeds; browse the easily friendly directory of thousands of feeds; add a feed from a news search engine; add your own feed; and to change the format of the widget to be whatever size you want.
There is a blog available at http://odysen.blogspot.com/. It includes page examples and details on new website features.