RSS is a method of distributing links to content in your web site that you'd like others to use. In other words, it's a mechanism to "syndicate" your content. To understand syndication, consider the "real world" situation where artist Scott Adams draws a daily Dilbert cartoon. The cartoon is made available to any newspaper that cares to run it, in exchange for a fee -- and 2,000 papers in 65 countries do so.

You’re familiar with e-mail, right? You read it as you receive it. Well, feeds are similar in analogy. For receiving and reading your email, you’d either need a software client (like Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora or others) or a service (such as Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail or others). Similarly, for reading site feeds, you’ll need a feed software (like FeedReader, Greatnews, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Newsgator or Sage extension for Firefox) or a service (such as Bloglines, My Yahoo!, Newsgator Online, Newsburst or Kinja online).

An XML-based format for publishing headlines of the latest updates posted to a blog or Web site for use by other Web sites and direct retrieval by end users. The format, known as a "feed," "news feed" or "Web feed," includes a headline, short description and link to the article. For a master list of syndication feeds, visit www.syndic8.com.

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.