The fine folks over at RSSDay.org have declared today to be RSS Appreciation Day. Following along in the spirit of things, I’ve decided to give a quick little primer on RSS feeds and how you can use them to make your use of the Internet one heck of a lot easier.

Okay, so, if you’re anything like me, the number one reason you use the Internet is to gather information. And it really doesn’t matter what kind of information you are getting - the daily news, tech reviews, friend updates from MySpace and Facebook, the latest scientific article, whatever. You probably also make a habit of visiting the same websites on a regular basis, because you like the content or maybe just because you like the way it is presented.

Now, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is simply a way for you to gather information from websites that update their content on a regular basis without having to visit the website over and over again. An RSS document, known as a feed, contains either a quick summary or the full content from a website’s update.

In order to make use of an RSS feed, you first need a feed reader. The two most common that I’ve seen in use are Google Reader and Bloglines. I personally use the latter, but you can use whatever feed reader you want. Most email programs including Outlook and Thunderbird now capture RSS feeds as well.

Once you’ve selected a feed reader, take a moment and visit one of your favorite websites and subscribe to their feed. You can do so by clicking on the orange feed icon either in the navigation bar of your browser or on the web page itself as shown in this image from my other website, Josephnassise.com.

Once you click on the icon you’ll be redirected to a page where you can subscribe to that feed with one or two clicks of your mouse. From that point on, to read the latest content from your site, all you have to do is visit your feedreader.

I regularly read about 50 sites per day, so this saves me a tremendous amount of time. By calling up my feed reader, I can read all the latest content from one location and not have to waste all that time jumping from page to page. If the content isn’t anything I’m interested in, I can simply skip it and move on to the next feed.

So there you have it, RSS feeds in a nut shell. So what are you waiting for? Go subscribe to something. You can even start with this site right here!