Have you seen the letters “RSS” or the orange icon that appears on your favorite blogs, news sites or websites and wondered what it was for? For a basic explanation, keep reading.

RSS is designed to make your web life easier and more efficient. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. RSS is used to syndicate or subscribe to the feed of a website, blog, or almost any media content online such as articles, music, video or digital media.

When you sign up for an RSS feed you are “syndicating” or subscribing to the feed of the site. This means that you do not have to visit the website to read the latest articles or updates. Instead of going to each of your favorite websites individually you can collect all of the feeds of your favorite sites and put them into one place.

To get started collecting feeds you need an RSS news reader. Don’t panic, these are easy to find and are free. Examples of popular news readers are FeedDemon, Bloglines, Google Reader and My Yahoo. Look around and choose a news reader best suited to you.

After you have selected a news reader you are ready to start subscribing to your favorite blogs and websites. After you have subscribed to some sites, open up your news reader and you should see a list of your feed sources. Click on them and you will see the headlines from each one. Click on the headlines and you will get summaries of the articles or the full text depending on each feed.

This is a very, very basic explanation but I hope it helps.