What is RSS?

Nearly half of the 31 billion e-mail messages sent every day are junk e-mail, and the average e-mail user receives 2,200 spam messages per year.

Using Real Simple Syndication or RSS is a great way to avoid this problem, whether you are an information publisher, or a recipient.

RSS delivers news from the web sites you want to read, directly to what's known as a newsreader. This software periodically checks each RSS channel to which you have subscribed, updates recently published news items and displays the results.

In fact, use of this "pull" technology has grown to the point that most email clients and even web browsers' latest versions have now built RSS readers directly into their user interfaces. This makes "subscribing" to a newsfeed easier than ever.

Users need not share their email address. Instead of publishers "pushing" information to the email boxes of thier subscribers, the subscribers newsreader "pulls" the content when the publisher makes it available.

Here's how to get started:

First you need to download a newsreader, or check for the latest version of your web browser, also known as an aggregator or RSS reader. You can also pull RSS feeds into customized homepages of Yahoo, Google and other portals. Click on the RSS feed for Let's Talk Prospecting, and copy the URL of the link into the address line of your reader.