RSS Esplained

Down here in Ecuador, we have been spending a
lot of time trying to explain, in Spanish, what exactly a Blog is.
The
closest we have come is by using analogies to a "Best places to go"
travel guide for a foreign country combined with a personal diary.
Everyone nods and says "Chevere" but we can tell they don’t have a
clue.  We haven’t even tried to get into what RSS is and why it
is even more significant than blogs themselves.  Perhaps we will
have to sit down and translate this article from todays New York Times,
which takes a stab at putting the technology into non-technical terms.
Amazing how something so intuitive and significant can be so hard to
explain…

Q. What does it mean when a Web site says it has an
R.S.S. feed available?
A. Really Simple Syndication (R.S.S. for short, and sometimes called
Rich Site Summary) is a tool used by a Web site for condensing new headlines
and information from the site into a bite-size summary, also known as
a feed. You can use a program called a news aggregator or news reader
to display these R.S.S. summaries (which usually include a headline,
a short description of the article and a link to the full article) on
your screen for a quick bite of news.