What is RSS?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. RSS easily allows people who regularly use a particular web site to gather information from it, through a subscription service. It allows you to automatically stay informed by retrieving specific summaries of the latest content from the sites you are interested in, such as a particular type of ad that is placed on WhistlerClassifieds.com. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News and Amazon.com.

On Web pages, web feeds (RSS or Atom) are typically linked with the word "Subscribe", an orange rectangle, a feed icon, or with the letters XML or RSS. Many news aggregators such as My Yahoo publish subscription buttons for use on Web pages to simplify the process of adding news feeds.