A few years ago I picked up a book that, right on the cover, advertised itself as a “tour de force.” Guess what? I read it; I didn’t get it. While apparently an “exceptional achievement,” it eluded me. Nothing worse than feeling dumb.

I felt the same way when I asked a more tech-savvy coworker what “RSS” meant. “Really Simple Syndication.” Hmm. Given that it was so simple, how could I follow up with, “What the heck is it for?”

While I’ll admit that I would have been reluctant to tackle something termed “Exceptionally Complex Concept,” I was equally hesitant to explore RSS because all I could think was, “What if someone explains it and I don’t get it?”

Alas someone did explain it and I did get it so I will pass on the favor because I have a sneaking suspicion that there are still plenty of smart people who don’t know what RSS is or why they might want to utilize it.

The basic concept is that information on the Internet is vast and ever changing. RSS gives you a way to tame the beast:

• content comes to you versus you surfing around OR
• you tailor the content your receive, thus are not bombarded with all that is available

An awkward but perhaps useful illustration is the housing market. Let’s say you want to buy a house. You can drive around and look for “For Sale” signs, but the instant you think you’re done, other houses will have gone on the market. So, even if you like driving around, you never know when you’ve seen what is available at any given time. Furthermore, you can’t tell from the curb what’s inside. So, many people sit down with a realtor, specify what kind of house they’re interested in, and the realtor lets them know when something comes on the market that meets their specifications.

RSS is your realtor, except RSS doesn’t get paid a commission, it’s free. Like your realtor, you can tell RSS how you want to be notified of what’s available. You can say

• “Send me an email regarding each new addition.” OR
• “Put each new addition in ‘a reader’ as it becomes available, and I will go there when I have time.” (sort of like stacking things up on the corner of your desk)

Now you can read the email when it arrives or read it later. You can go through your inbox when you have time or you can pick up the whole stack and throw it out. The one thing you don’t have to do is go looking. You need only decide to read or delete. (Note: to avoid overwhelming your inbox, Microsoft Outlook maintains separate folders where RSS feeds go, or you can set up filters and rules in Outlook so your email feeds go wherever you want them.

So, RSS saves you time. Instead of  surfing around from website to website, you just go once and “subscribe” to a website’s RSS feed. Do that by clicking on the (typically) orange RSS icon then follow the instructions. Now, whenever that website has new content, it will come to you. And while you’re at it, subscribe to our Practice Blawg feed here.

If it is a website with various kinds of content, you can ask to be notified only when certain kinds of content are updated. In other words, you can “tailor your feed.” The New York Times is a good example: Click here. See? You can ask to receive any news updates, only sports updates or further tailor to just ones on college basketball.

So, to recap, you now realize you can stop running around the Web and let the part of the Web that interests you come directly to you. Or, as I mentioned earlier, come to your reader. In other words, instead of coming into your email inbox, you can have it stack up somewhere. That somewhere is a reader. Check out any of these popular free readers.

If you decide to go the reader route, set up the reader first, then tell the RSS to send info to the reader, not to your email inbox. Either way you are taming the vast, ever-changing information flow on the Web. You’ll get exactly what you want, you won’t miss new content postings, nor waste time surfing.

In closing, I hope you have found my explanation of RSS to be a really simple tour de force.