On this site and others, you have probably seen the small orange and white icon maybe along with words like “RSS feed.” RSS, or “really simple syndication,” gives users of the web a way to have news from your favorite sites delivered to you. You build up a list of the sites you care about in your news reader. Then, updates come to you in digest form, aggregated together. For the full story, you click on the link which takes you back to the original web page, blog entry, multimedia source or other web content.

Why would you use a news reader? Instead of collecting tons of bookmarks and remembering to check for updates, you can list your favorite sites and let your news reader collect updates from each site’s news service. Just using bookmarks in your browser leaves you with too much to remember.

Using a news reader also gives you an alternative to getting news via email lists. Email lists still have their place. Many of us already have really cluttered in-boxes and the times you have to catch up on news may not be the time when you check email for daily tasks. With a news reader, when you have time to catch up, you can go to one place and use your own customized news service. You also have less worries about your web service provider or email client blocking sources you want to read as spam, omitting images or other nuisances. More and more organizations and businesses use news feeds alongside or even as alternatives to maintaining mailing lists.

Getting started is easier than ever. You have these choices.

If you use Google or other popular web portals as you home page, the chances are they provide a built-in news reader. For a really easy way to get started, check out www.google.com/reader or http://my.yahoo.com/s/about/rss/index.html.

You can also set up a free account on a web-based news reader service. A popular example of this approach is http://www.bloglines.com/.

Both these kinds of approaches mean that so long as you have an Internet connection anywhere, you can log in and check your news, just as you can use webmail to check email. Once you have your reader set up, if you click on the RSS feed icon on a new site, it will pop you into a dialog to add that news source to your reader.

As an alternative, you may want to set up a reader that works directly on your computer. If you use Outlook, you can set it up as a news reader to pull in news as well as your email. This may defeat the purpose of separating news from email, and it may contribute to email performance issues, but for some, it fits the bill.

Another choice is to install a news reader as extension to your web browser. If you live in your FireFox browser and are used to adding features to make it your command center, then check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/424 or other Firefox extensions.

And for some, the best thing is a stand-alone news reader program to install on your desktop. If you are just getting started, given all these easier alternatives, there is not much point to that.

These days, using a news reader is relatively painless. Give it a try so you can get all the great new stuff here as well as from your other favorite web sites.

If you are new to this, read more here from TechSoup.