The more I use it, the more I am becoming a bigger fan of Really Simple Syndication, better known as RSS. In fact, it has almost becoming a borderline obsession for me over the past few weeks. I like the way it acts as both a content syndication service and a notification system. And it is nice that RSS doesn't require any specialized software, so I don't have to download any new applications; see my first column .

RSS has become popular in the age of blogs, but it has more universal and interesting applications. The basics behind RSS are simple: when someone adds content to a server, the site can be configured to send out an RSS message so that you can be notified of this new material. You can pick up these messages in any number of products, called RSS readers. These include specialized software tools, combination reader/email clients like Mozilla's Thunderbird, and various Web services that can aggregate the content. Examples of the last of these are My.Yahoo.com, NewsGator.com, and Bloglines.com.

For those of you old enough to remember, this whole RSS thing sounds annoyingly and cloyingly like what was once called "push technology", which was the darling of the digerati in 1996. Back then, we had special software that you could put on your PC, and whenever some new content came rolling along from your favorite sites, it would be "pushed" to your desktop. You could then read it without having to constantly root around in your browser to see what was new on your sites of choice.

For my part, in the process of sending out my own email newsletter, I had a brief relationship with various push products. But I kept returning to email as the best notification mechanism for keeping my list updated. When push died, everyone else pretty much joined me, going back to using - and abusing - email.

However, email is a flawed notification system, especially these days. For one thing, filters tend to block many messages, especially if you have certain trigger words in the subject line or message body. And people change email addresses frequently, making it hard for your correspondents to keep track of you. That's where RSS comes in handy - it allows the distribution of content without email addresses.

RSS is certainly here to stay. Witness the rise of IUpload and Pheedo, which allow advertisers to insert their ads into RSS feeds. (Is nothing sacred?) But seriously, when advertisers discover how to exploit new media, it means the media is no longer new. There is now a lot of practical stuff that you too can do with RSS from the comfort of your own PC, to brighten your day and have yet another thing to check as information flows into your life.

The first generation of RSS feeds were mostly one-to-many communications, mirroring the blogosphere and email lists that spawned them. But the cool thing about this latest crop of RSS feeds is that they are customized to your particular needs, and one-to-one communications. In a moment I will get to some of them of which I am particularly fond.

But RSS isn't always easy, as I found out when I tried to add feeds to various readers. The trouble is that there are numerous and conflicting standards. Haven't we heard this tune before? And while some readers, like My Yahoo and Bloglines, try to make it easier to add feeds, they also make it harder to work with particular feeds that don't fit their models, such as the Gmail notifier (which uses an SSL connection.)

Here are some of the more noteworthy examples that I have come across; they will stimulate your thinking about what is possible with this new technology. Thanks to Tara Calishain and Andrew Newton for providing the stimulus, and many of the links to these feeds. If you have your own favorites, please share them with me.

While you are at it, check out our own RSS feeds here at THG, to help keep up to date with what we are posting. We have four different feeds for articles and news headlines for the main and networking sites:

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/TNfeaturesRSS.php
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/TNheadlineRSS.php
http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/news.xml
http://www.tomshardware.com/articles.xml