I had a friend of mine recently ask what RSS was.  (You know - those little orange radio wave looking things that are on every blog and podcast.)  Seems she had gone onto Wikipedia and other sites to figure it out and nothing made sense.  I remember doing this too when I first learned about RSS.  Nothing made sense.  I thought that some of you might also share this confusion.  So I'm going to share with you what I used to explain it to her.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” which is like setting up TiVo. You use a reader (like Google Reader, My MSN, or My Yahoo) and you tell it what you want to read by subscribing to the RSS feed for different sites. For instance, I might like to read The New York Times, the Speaking of Real Estate Blog put out by NAR, The Onion blog, and see what the White House is saying today. So I would go and subscribe through the RSS reader for each of those sites. Then I would open my reader program each morning and read what those sites had to say that day, rather than having to go to each site individually to get the information.

I hope this helps!