Back in October of 2008, Forrester released a report that consumer adoption of RSS had only reached 11%. Albeit, this is partly because many consumers don’t even realize when they’re using RSS, as in feeds aggregating content to sites they frequent. Still, I was shocked.

Then as I was visiting a friend, who still read the <gasp> newspaper every morning, I realized that we interactive types sometimes live inside a cocoon of geekiness. I didn’t think anyone still braved ink-stained hands and paper cuts with archaic newsprint. Google Reader is my morning newspaper; I just assumed it was everyone else’s too.

I’ve found myself trying to explain RSS countless times since. Here’s the best way I can put it: instead of remembering every blog, news site and outpost of information you go to on a daily basis to find information, you tell them all to deliver their new articles, updates and postings directly to you. That way, all of your sources of daily information are consolidated into one simple place for you to read, digest and enjoy.

It’s like creating your own daily newspaper made up of only the sources of information you choose.

The Middle “S” is for Simple – They’re Not Lying

Don’t worry about all the technical speak surrounding feeds and RSS, just pick a reader. I recommend Google Reader. If you don’t have a Google Account, sign up for one. If you already have one, then you already have a google reader account.Now you just need to subscribe to feeds.

Go to one of your favorite news sites. Look for the standard RSS icon:

Click on it and you will be asked how you want to subscribe. Click on Google. You’ll then be asked if you want to add to google homepage, or google reader. Select “Add to Google Reader.”  You may be prompted to log in to your reader account, in which case you know what to do.

You’ve just subscribed to your first feed. Now go to all your other favorite sites and do the same. You’ll end up with a Reader interface that looks similar to mine:

From now on all you need to do is come to your reader page and read all the latest articles from all of your favorite sites, in one place. No more having to go out and check sites to see when they’ve posted new content. Here’s a couple of tips to get you started:

• All your feeds are on the left sidebar. The number of new articles for each site will appear in bold next to it’s title. You can read through articles from all your subscribed sites, or you can click on individual sites to read only the articles from it.
• Click on settings in the upper right. Once there, click on the subscriptions tab. Here you can put each subscription into a folder. This helps you organize all the different sites you’ve subscribed to. As you can see from my screenshot, I have several different folders to help me organize the subject matter of the hundreds of feeds I subscribe to.
• You can add friends within Google Reader, which is a very good way to see new content. Likewise, if you “share” one of your subscribed pieces, all of your friends can see it as well.

Other Practical Uses for RSS

Besides keeping up to date with your favorite news sites and blogs, there are other ways to use RSS too:

• Craigslist – are you searching for a particular item on craigslist? Look at the bottom of a category page, or at the bottom of your craigslist search query page. You’ll see an RSS subscribe button. Subscribe to it and every new posted item that fits your search criteria will appear in your google reader. Subscribe to the search query in several local cities, put them into a “Craigslist” folder in your reader, and you suddenly have an easy way of monitoring for when someone posts that item you’re looking for.
• For monitoring mentions of your brand: most social searches can be subscribed to by RSS. So subscribe to your brand on search.twitter.com, backtype.com, delicious.com or any other social search you want. Put all the subscriptions in a “monitoring” folder in reader, and you don’t have to keep checking the searches – they all come to you.
• To continue that point, Google Alerts and Google Blog Search can also be subscribed to via RSS. Again, aggregrating anything you want to monitor directly into your reader.

As you can see, RSS is not only easy, but it’s incredibly powerful and useful. If you’re not already using RSS feeds to pull all the information you’re looking for into your own central repository, there’s no better time to start.