What is RSS?

Depending on whom you ask, the acronym RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication", "Rich Site Summary", or any of a handful of others.

The meaning of the acronym is not terribly important, however. An RSS feed (also known as a news feed) is a site's syndicated news feed that you subscribe to using your news reader.

What is a news feed?

A news feed (also known as an RSS feed) is a listing of a website's content. It is updated whenever new content is published to the site. News readers "subscribe" to news feeds, which means they download lists of stories at an interval that you specify (every 30 minutes, for example), and present them to you in your news reader. A news feed might contain a list of story headlines, a list of excerpts from the stories, or a list containing each story from the website (MRC's news feeds contain article excerpts). All news feeds will have a link back to the website, so if you see a headline / excerpt / story you like, you can click on the link for that piece of content and will be taken to the website to read it.