RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is one of those simple ideas that has the potential to make a big impact, think email.

RSS is simply a standard for publishing special web pages, called RSS feeds. Because all RSS feeds follow particular standards they can be processed by programs called aggregators. An aggregator, or feed reader, is a tool that takes a list of different feeds that you want to keep track of, your subscribed feeds, and presents you with all the content that’s new from your subscriptions.

Here’s a real life example of how RSS aggregators can be used, in fact it’s how I use them myself. There are a couple of dozen news sites and blogs that I like to keep track of. The problem is that’s a lot of web sites to visit every day, especially as some of them only publish new content infrequently and many of the updates don’t particularly interest me. That’s where my feed aggregator comes in (I use Bloglines, it’s a free online aggregator that works well). For each of the sites I want to keep up with I add the RSS feed to Bloglines (most times Bloglines can find the RSS feed automatically if you give it the address of the web site). Now I can just access Bloglines and get a summary of all that’s new for my feeds, saving me an awful lot of time browsing from site to site.

Like email you don’t need need to understand how RSS actually works to be able to use it (you can read more detailed explanations if you’re interested in the internals).

Other free news aggregators: Newsgator, My Yahoo!.

Get started: Well you can always subscribe to the Hogtown Consulting feed and Bloglines has a Quickpick directory of popular RSS feeds in different interest areas.