RSS and Atom are 2 XML based technologies that allow websites to syndicate their content. These are called news feeds, or just feeds for short. Rather than having to visit your multiple favorite websites to see any new content, you can easily read multiple website feeds that gives you the latest news from those sites. Useally a website will offer a title and a description in the feed, and after reading them, you can decide if you wish to visit the site to read the entire article or find out more information about the item in the feed. Feeds can contain more than just news. They may help you keep up to date with sports scores, blog entries, prices of an item you are wanting to purchase, weather forecasts, jokes, recipes, new photos, etc. A website can display just about any content to you they wish.

Since they are XML, they require a newsreader or aggregator to be able to view them. There are quite a few RSS and atom feed readers available, some cost money, others are free or built into products. Some examples of free ones are the Google Home page, MyYahoo!, and of course this site. Also, the Firefox browser has a reader built into it, as well as some email applications.

Once you've selected a reader, you can then get (or subscribe to) your favorite site's feed from the web site itself or from a directory, such as ours or syndic8.com. While viewing a feed in our directory, we offer several buttons that will automatically subscribe you to a feed from various free feed readers. You will be able to then see all the latest news and information (usually a title and description, but is really up to whatever the site wants you to see) from your favorite websites all in one area (the feed aggregator portion) and visit the site with the current information that interests you most. You can find more information about syntax and standards here.