If you are only accessing the internet with a web browser then you may just be missing out on one of the most simple and intuitive ways of checking your favourite sites for the latest news and making the whole process easier.

 

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a system that allows information online to be accessed and used in a completely different way. In practical terms this means that you can browse through the massive amount of new information that crops up on the internet every day much more quickly – and get access to the stories that you want to in the specific areas that you most like.

 

RSS is essentially a web page which allows you to see when a website has been updated and what it has been updated with. You can subscribe to feeds on many websites that you enjoy – and you can then quickly find out when that site changes.

 

Not every site will have an RSS feed – but most of the major sites do and the number is growing rapidly as people increasingly use RSS as a way of accessing the web.

 

Typically you would use an RSS reader to access this information – these are often built into your web browser, but you can also create your own page in something like Microsoft’s Live or iGoogle that update the feeds regularly for you – in essence creating a page that has most of your favourite sites’ latest stories on and a click away.

 

If you download a reader program rather than using your browser or an online version then it works in a similar way to your e-mail program, periodically looking to see if the RSS feeds have been updated and downloading the new information when it has and then allowing you to access it regardless of whether you are online or offline.

 

In newer operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows Vista and Apple’s OSX – you can also access desktop tools that allow you to keep an eye on these RSS feeds.

 

Subscribing to feeds – essentially telling your reader which websites and news feeds you want to be kept up to date on -  is, as the name suggests, really simple. Many browsers, including Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer, tell you when a site has an available RSS feed by showing the orange RSS icon. You can normally click on this icon and then select the ‘subscribe to this feed’ option.

 

If you want to add an RSS feed to a Live/iGoogle/Yahoo page that you have created then you can normally get an address (just like a web address) that you can then add in so that the program knows where to look for the code. For example – the feed for the latest feature articles from MSN’s Tech & Gadget channel looks like this: ‘http://tech.uk.msn.com/RSSUKTechandGadgetslatestfeatures.aspx’.

 

Of course sometimes your tastes and interests change, but it is incredibly simple to add or remove feeds that you find or decide you’ve had enough of. In the same way as you can delete old pages from your favourites on your internet browser you can delete feeds.

 

Using RSS is incredibly easy and it could well change the way in which you access web content – so give it a try and suddenly clicking through a list of favourites may not seem so appealing.