Well, first off, RSS is (as of October 13th, 2002) the most recent feature addition to Fury.com. More importantly, RSS is probably the optimal way to track all the sites you read (that have RSS feeds), seeing what new items have been posted since your last visit, and getting a quick look at the headlines and excerpts before jumping over to the site.

Don't get me wrong, I like people hitting the main page as often as possible. In fact, I regularly check my stats page to see just how many front page views there are on any given day. Keeping that number up is one of my motivations for making sure I don't go more than a day or two without posting.

Nevertheless, there are better ways to surf the web than jumping back to the same sites a couple (or couple dozen) times a day, just to see if anything new has been posted. This is where RSS comes in.

It doesn't have a catchy name. In fact, there's not even agreement on what 'RSS' stands for (but the same argument rages about 'PHP', not that it's hindered PHP's popularity. Most of the descriptions you'll find if you search for 'What is RSS' are at least two years old. Worse, they're written for people who might want to create an RSS feed, instead of those who might want to read one. Even worse, it talks about RSS in terms of XML, and I know there's no faster way to make a non-geek's (or even a lot of geeks') eyes glaze over than to even mention XML.

RSS is just a protocol, a format. Several really good programs have come out recently that will take the RSS pages for the sites you regularly visit and check them once every hour (or 30 minutes, or 4 hours, or whenever you say) and it'll tell you how many new articles have been posted. Even better, it'll give you a list of those articles' titles, and even give you a description of the article. This description is usually the first paragraph or so of the article. sometime's it's a bona-fide synopsis, and sometimes it doesn't exist at all. It all depends on how the site's creator set up the RSS feed.

But a picture's worth a thousand words, and my thousand's almost up. This is a screen shot form NetNewsWire Lite, easily the best RSS viewer currently out for OS X:

NetNewsWire Lite in action...

For the PC, there are a few good RSS readers, and some not so good ones. The most recent, and the one that seems to lead the bunch in terms of looks and functionality is NewzCrawler. Trillian, the AIM/Y!M/MSN/ICQ überclient, also supports RSS feeds, and I'm sure some people using RSS feeds now probably have some good insights into good Windows clients, so you might want to check the comments.

I hope this explains a bit about what RSS feeds are, but I understand if it doesn't. I expect that this page will probably make it to the first page of hits for the google search linked above, and if that happens, I'll feel obligatged to make it a little more holisitic, so please let me know if, after reading this post you 'get it' or are still backing away slowly...

Now, if you're sold on RSS, have downloaded a reader, and are good to go, then the icon links to the RSS feed, so you can right-click (option click for macfolk) to copy the url to the clipboard, and then paste it into the appropriate spot on your RSS reader program.

Give it a go... RSS has been around for over 3 years, but only in the last three or four months has it really been starting to pick up steam. Most of the news and community sites you might read (news.com, bbc, msnbc, slashdot, metafilter, kuro5hin, wired, plastic, etc.) already have RSS feeds, as do a lot of the blogs out there, since both Blogger 2.0 and Moveable Type 2.5 offer RSS feeds with the check of a checkbox, alongside a regular blog. If your favorite site doesn't have the XML button, ask them if they have an RSS feed. You might get a pleasant surprise. If not, they might decide to check that box (or write that code, for us loners who write our own blogging software), and join the coming wave of RSS-savvy folk.

Incidentally, this also spells the official end of Metacookie because, while it was a great idea, RSS feeds have already reached the tipping point, and actually provide a better solution to the problem of keeping current with a site. That admission alone should tell you just how viable I think it is.