As a follow-up to Monday’s post on why your site should offer RSS feeds, I want to share some of my thoughts on personal use of RSS.

As I mentioned, I took a while to start using RSS (procrastination, to a certain degree) but once I did, I became a convert. It has made my web browsing a lot easier, helped me not miss out on things, and lets me browse more websites than I could before in a similar amount of time.

So what is RSS? In simple terms, it’s a collection of updates from your chosen websites. In Google Reader, the tool I use (although it’s certainly not the only one out there), I can subscribe to sites that offer RSS feeds and then scroll through new content as it comes in and click through to only those items that interest me. I can also bookmark (”star”) content to save it for later and share it with others. Here’s a screenshot of my page so you can see what I mean. (As you can see, I subscribe to this blog.)

If you don’t read a lot of websites regularly (or don’t want to) then RSS may not be ideal for you, but if you’re like me and like to stay up to date on news, blogs, competitors’ websites, etc., then I recommend trying RSS out and seeing how you like it.