(This page refers to RSS, but applies also to Atom and other feed formats, as they are all used fundamentally the same.)

Recognizing that many people may not know what RSS is and why it is so useful….

It stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Imagine if every time you wanted to read Time Magazine, or the National Geographic, or every time you wanted to watch CNN, you had to visit Time Warner’s building at Columbus Circle, or a TV sound stage somewhere.

Instead, you subscribe to cable, or subscribe to periodicals.

Subscribing to web sites is even easier than this — and totally free. There are about a hundred websites like this one that I read frequently. But I never actually visit a single one of them. I subscribe to them, and when an article (a “post”) is written, it comes to my doorstep like a newspaper.

There are a great number of free web services (just like free email services) that let you setup an account and subscribe to web sites just like this one. You can also subscribe to news sites, weather sites, Amazon, or any of the growing number of pages offering RSS or XML feeds. It’s pretty standard everywhere by this point.

Some of those services that let you do this include Google Reader, Bloglines, and Newsgator. But there are many more, just like there are many different ways people check email.

Examples of things I subscribe too: my favorite photographers’ newest pictures at flickr.com; my favorite news topics at cnn.com; the forums at cinematography.com; daily weather forecasts for my favorite cities in the world; the latest DVD releases on Netflix; and of course, countless blogs written by interesting people who have better things to say than myself, like Ken Levine, who was a staff writer on the hit TV shows Cheers, Simpsons, Frasier, Mash, and others, or Josh Friedman who wrote the screenplay to Black Dhalia. You can subscribe to your Netflix queue, or the daily Hollywood studio and gossip updates from the Internet Movie Database. The list goes on and on, and these days many people have their own RSS feeds for pretty much everything.

To learn more about RSS, see this video.

For the feeds available at andrew.fm, click here.