RSS ... What's in a name.

What is RSS?
RSS is a pretty geeky name, but the idea behind it is simple. Some people say it means “Rich Site Summary” and some say it is “Really Simple Syndication”. In a nutshell, RSS lets you easily keep track of changes in blogs and forums, or any other site on the Internet that supports RSS.
How do I use RSS?
To read an RSS feed, you need a “news reader” that can read the RSS news provided by a site. There are many different types of news readers available, both web-based and as downloadable software, both paid and free. We encourage you to try out different ones to see which one suits you best. Here are some popular ones.
For Windows:
Newz Crawler
FeedDemon
Sage (Firefox plugin)

Web-based:
Bloglines
My Yahoo!
NewsGator
See also a good RSS explanation on the BBC web site