What Is RSS?
If you’re not familiar with RSS (really simple syndication), you’re missing out on a massive technological advancement in the web. This is probably one of the coolest, most simple, little pieces of technology on the web.
So basically what RSS allows you to do is subscribe to a blog, or any other site that gets updated with new content, and be automatically notified every time it is updated. There is a multitude of things you can do with this.
For example, if you download movies or music from a select few sites, they allow you to subscribe to their updates so you will get notified every time a new artist comes out with a new CD/Single. If you subscribe to a blog, this one for instance, you will get updated every time I post a new entry. So if you use Firefox as your browser, all you have to do is click on the link and it will add the subscription automatically for you in your bookmarks.
You can tell if a site has an RSS feed if you see an icon that looks something like this 
or if it says “RSS”, “Subscribe”, or “Syndicate”.
Now all you have to do is choose how you would like to be notified every time one of these feeds updates. You can go the simple, but not flexible, route and just organize them as bookmarks in Firefox or your browser of choice. You can subscribe to them on different desktop software apps, such as Thunderbird or Outlook, with more flexibility. Or you can read them through a feed aggregator, or feed reader. These readers, such as Google Reader or Feed Reader (massive list of readers here), will pull all of the feeds that you specify and organize them according to your specifications.
There are a multitude of uses for this technology — just hunt down the feed on the site of your choice (if the site offers it).
How I Use RSS
There are really just too many interesting articles/videos/podcasts/webinars/posts to read, even for the champion speed-reader. Staying on top of current web marketing technologies and techniques is important to me, as well as what’s going on in the mobile and SMS fields, automotive manufacturing, search engine marketing, and so on…
So I’ve found a couple hundred blogs that I’d like to stay up to date with. After adding them all to my Google Reader, I took a little extra time to go through and prioritize these blogs based on my interests and their quality of content. Every morning, I’ll open my Reader and go through my High Priority feeds. If I feel like I have some extra time and don’t have any pressing work to get done, I’ll venture through my medium and low priority feeds to scan for any titles that may catch my eye (another reason why catchy and well-written titles are becoming ever-more important).
My priorities include High, Medium, Low, and No. It’s important to keep the high priority folder maneagable – meaning if it takes you half a day to read, it’s time to do spring cleaning a little early.
Here’s what my Reader looks like at the time of this post:
I also share any articles that I think my friends would enjoy. Google has a cool feature which allows you to link to a page that displays your shared items. Here’s mine if you would like an example: Vitaliy’s shared Google Reader items.
Most feed aggregators will also allow you to somehow save certain articles for later reading or referencing (a star in Google Reader). This helps big time when I’m reading a piece of research and would like to reference it at a later date or send it to someone after mentioning it in conversation.
Bottom Line
If you visit any sites that update their content and offer RSS, use it. It will save you many hours of browsing in the future and I guarantee you will learn something you weren’t expecting but are glad you did.