RSS is gaining some momentum among Internet users. A while back, a Pew Internet and American Life study showed that RSS adoption now is at 5% of Internet users. 6 million people get their news via RSS. Pretty big deal.

For those of you that don’t know what it is, RSS is simply a way that a site can notify people what the latest headlines are on their site. For this reason, they’re also called “news feeds.” ESPN.com, for example, publishes news feeds for most of our content. More sites are doing so each day. Just recently, CNN.com joined the ranks of news feed publishers.

Most of you have navigated to a site just to see if there was any news you might be interested in. After waiting for the page to load and then the ad to load, you see that headline hasn’t changed and you’re not interested in any of the stories linked to on the front page. Or, your friend may have a blog that they update every few days. You go back every day just to see if anything has changed, only to find that nothing has. Or, you want to know when your brother posted new photographs on his photo site. News feeds can help solve all of this problems by allowing you to get all the information in one convenient place with notifications when there is new information. No more surfing around just to see what’s changed.

So what do you need to take advantage of news feeds? You just need a program or a web site called a news aggregator. These programs allow you to collect all the feeds you’re interested in into once place. From there, you can keep track of all the different sites you surf. Just choose an aggregator that suits you, set it up, and away you go.

The easiest way to get started is to use a web-based news aggregator. The two best I know of are BlogLines and NewsGator. Both offer comprehensive functionality for managing and finding feeds. They also offer functionality to access your feeds via your cell phone. Kareem is currently a big fan of NewsGator. Other folks I know really like BlogLines.

If desktop software is more your speed, NetNewsWire is my aggregator of choice. They have some great features, are the market leader on the Mac, and are always adding features, including PodCasting. FeedDemon seems to be the current king on Windows. Both NetNewsWire and FeedDemon are commercial products, though NetNewsWire does have a free “Lite” version. You can read this recent list of aggregator market share to see other choices.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.