If you look down on the right hand side of this page you’ll see a few little link boxes. In fact, if you look around to many news based pages or blogs you’ll probably see a lot of little links similar to these. So, what is RSS you might be asking. Well…Wikipedia says it this way: RSS is used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. Get that? It’s somewhat confusing in those terms so i’ll try to use some analogies to make it seem simpler.

Think of something like Headline News. They give you the world’s news in just 30 minutes, where as CNN, Foxnews, MSNBC and such give you twenty four hour coverage. Well, you could sit through and listen to hours of talking, advertisements and stupid marketing gimics, or you could just turn on Headline News and get the same thing in a fraction of the time. An RSS feed is kind of like that, but more advanced. You create “live bookmarks” for all your favorite pages (ie silentfool.com). And then when you wake up in the morning, instead of going to each individual page to see if there are updates you can just bring up your RSS reader, click “update” and it will hightlight all of the new stories/blogs/etc. Your RSS reader will then allow you to browse through the text without having to load any graphics or advertisements…you can just get the “meat”. And if you want to read more or actually check out the “real” page, you can just click on the supplied link and you’re there. It’s a extremely efficient way to absorb a ton of information in as little time as possible.

That’s a basic rundown of it. I hope I didn’t confuse anyone too much. If you’d like to read a little more here’s a link to Wikipedia: RSS Feeds

Also you might want to check out: Bloglines
although, I personally prefer Sage (Mozilla Firefox required)

Some of my favorite feeds:
Michelle Malkin
Slashdot
digg
Engadget
loveforaliar(needs to update more!)