RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It's a way of keeping up to date without having to go to a website to see what's new by using a program called a News Reader.
Many websites (eg the BBC) now offer 'channels' which you can set up in your News Reader.
To get a News Reader visit Google's directory. We've tried SharpReader, Wildgrape NewsDesk, NewsGator and RssReader. If you're not sure which one to use RssReader seems to be a good start for Windows-based computers because it's not full of unwanted feeds, however the choice is ultimately yours.
Only if you have relatively fast-changing information such as theatre programmes, jobs, courses etc to which people are likely to want to subscribe.
Implicit in the decision to go with it is the fact that your website must be content-managed - ie driven by a database - because the RSS feed needs to be regenerated automatically at regular (usually hourly or daily) intervals.
One thing sometimes overlooked is that it may not just be members of the public who are using your service, but other websites may use your RSS feed to put your information on their own website in a different format. This is usually to the good as it will link back to the main feature on your website.
From a user point of view, there are a lot of RSS feeds out there - too many really. Your news reader needs to have pretty smart filtering capabilities if it's actually going to save you time.
As a syndicator, you have to ensure that your servers can handle traffic spikes as these automated systems update themselves on the hour. It would be appropriate to have a bandwidth throttle on RSS pages.
The language used to code RSS pages is called XML. XML is being used increasingly for inter-computer communications, particularly where those computers don't usually like to talk to each other (eg PCs and Macs). When you click through to a RSS feed page, you will frequently see the XML code - which isn't that hard for a human to read.
These feeds have been pre-styled by the feed operators, but you can change the format to fit your house style should you want to bring it into your website.