RSS feeds are an interesting online application because, although they are very widely used, there are still many people who do not really understand what they are, or how they function.
To explain, RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, though it is often dubbed Really Simple Syndication since this might be considered a better description of how it operates. An RSS is basically an online aggregation application that syndicates data as it appears real time, in a unified format. This might sound pretty complicated, but it is actually quite simple.
Say you follow eight blogs about wrestling. You like reading all the updates, but these blogs all update at different times, on different days, and you do not want to constantly check their sites or memorize complicated schedules. Instead, you can add all these websites to your RSS wrestling feed, aggregating it all in one place.
The RSS feed will then syndicate, or publish, all the data these different sites update with, in a unified format, su
