We've all seen the little orange box with either XML or RSS in it. Just what is that thing?

RSS means (among other definitions) "Really Simple Syndication". It's a means to allow publishing content, generally news or articles, from a site so that others may easily read it. It's a one-way medium - always outbound.

It's different from an email list because what you see is a type of unordered index - it shows a headline and a portion of the body for that headline.

To read the entire article you will generally need to ask for it from the website. What that means in most RSS readers or browsers is that you click on the headline to read it. There is some work being done to allow the entire article to be sent but it seems slow in coming. It seems the longer format is not part of the current definition.

What this basically allows, that email programs cannot currently do without an add-on is this: You can look at headline indices at various places and only read what you are really interested in.

For this purpose there are various RSS-reader programs and even websites to allow you to do this. Some browsers also allow you to follow RSS feeds.

Firefox is one that allows this. When you are on a website, if will auto-detect RSS availability. If you see an orange square with white waves in the lower right of the browser window you click on it, then click on "Subscribe to RSS feed..." and it's done. Other browsers have similar features.

An add-on for Outlook called You Subscribe: RSS is available. It ties Firefox and Outlook together for RSS. It appears this is currently free, it also appears they will start selling it in the future. As to how it works, I have no idea as I don't use Outlook.

I'll try to post more links to other programs as I can.