To access the RSS Feeds you subscribe to you will need a RSS Feed Reader. There are a large number of RSS Feed Readers you can use. Good Feed Readers allow you to search, organize and categorize RSS news items.

My Top 5 free RSS readers are:

Google Reader

http://www.google.com/reader
Google Reader features:

• Works in most modern browsers without needing to install any software.
• Has sensible keyboard shortcuts to make navigating easy
• Lets you tag, sort and organize individual items using labels
• Allows you to easily share items on a public web page that has an RSS feed itself and send items by email, or use tags for blogrolls.
• Has a blog and news search engine to make it easy to find and subscribe to feeds
• Google Gears allows you to access up to 2000 items offline

Bloglines

http://www.bloglines.com/
Cool Bloglines features:

• Mobile Bloglines: Allows access to your favourite content on your phone
• Drag and Drop Feed Manager: Drag and drop to manage your feeds
• Bloglines Top 1000: Keep track of the Top 1000 most popular feeds
• 3 Pane Reading View: Gives you more options for reading your feeds
• Custom Start Page: Allows you to customise your start page with your favourite content

Feedreader

http://www.feedreader.com/
Feedreader features:

• Feedreader is completely free software that you download and install on your computer
• It has a very simple and easy-to-use interface which even non-technical users find easy to understand and navigate.
• Users can create smart feeds by adding key words or phrases related to their area of interest. Feedreader automatically monitors articles, and displays those topics
• Allows you to add or remove columns from your view
• With a single click you can group headlines by source, date, or tag

MyYahoo

http://my.yahoo.com/
You can subscribe to RSS feeds using My Yahoo!

MyYahoo features:

• By entering a keyword or search term Yahoo will automatically create an RSS feed to track the latest news search results for that topic.
• Yahoo has a very good tutorial on how to set up RSS feeds on to your “My Yahoo!” Page. Click here to read it http://help.yahoo.com/tutorials/my2/mycham/my_addcontent3.html

Firefox Feedly Reader RSS Add-On

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8538
If you use Firefox as your default browser then you should consider using the Firefox Add-On Feedly Reader  to view your RSS Feeds Firefox Reader features:

• Allows you to import your favorite RSS feeds and sources from Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes or your bookmarks
• Allows you to collect and organize RSS feeds into tabs/categories
• You can configure multiple views: title only, title and summary, image grid, video grid, entire content
• Allows you to filter the most relevant/popular content
• You can share articles on twitter, friendfeed, tumblr, delicious and facebook
• Has an excellent list of keyboard shortcuts

 The firefox add-on can be found here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8538

So you have seen the term RSS and the orange RSS logo on many sites, so what exactly is RSS? Many blogs and news sites syndicate their content

Benefits of RSS

You do not have to visit each of your favourite websites individually to stay informed of their latest content updates. This saves a lot of time and makes it so much easier to keep up to date with news and information about things you are interested in. RSS can seriously make your life a lot easier! Also it’s free!

If you subscribe to an RSS feed on a website you are interested in, the feed reader will check the website for any new content. Any new articles will be displayed within the reader without you having to go back to the original site and check yourself.

You also don’t have to give your email address to the sites you subscribe to. This means you don’t have to worry about the site on-selling your email address or sending you spam email. RSS is an easy anonymous way to keep up to date with your favourite sites content and it’s very easy to unsubscribe (usually with just one click).

Stay tuned for my next post which will review free RSS Readers.