RSS is a great way to gain control of information. As a user of RSS, you can browse literay hundreds of headlines in minutes. It’s really quite nice.

As a marketer you can use RSS to push information out to customers, sales reps, anyone who subscribes to your RSS.

Like most things on the web, it’s easier to understand RSS if you begin to use it. So here we go.

The first step with understanding RSS is getting your own RSS aggregator/reader, subscribing to RSS feeds and seeing how it all works.

There’s a variety of RSS aggregators to choose from, including the following:

Desktop RSS aggregators (software). The first 2 are free and work just fine. I don’t know about the others. I favor these to the below online RSS readers:
ranchero.com/netnewswire/ - NetNewsWire, both free and paid versions for MAC (I can vouch for this one. Also iPodderX is great for podcasts - just an FYI)
www.feedreader.com - Free for the PC (I vouch for this one too.)
www.awasu.com
www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon
www.stevenwood.org/stories/2003/06/08/voxLite.htm

Web-based RSS aggregators:
my.yahoo.com
www.pluck.com
www.newsgator.com
www.bloglines.com
www.google.com/reader/things/intro

Integrated RSS aggregators (integrate with IE or Microsoft Outlook):
www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ (browser with integrated RSS features)
www.newsgator.com
www.pluck.com
www.attensa.com/index.php?ys=1

After you choose a reader, you need something to read.
To find feeds of interest to subscribe to, take a look at www.feedster.com. You can also search for “RSS feeds” in your favorite search engine.

Look for the little “xml” orange button, like on http://news.yahoo.com/rss. This should load the RSS software I mentioned earlier and then you will see all the headlines in your rss reader!