All related activities - such as content updates, for example - were also manual, and dependent upon the user to track and perform necessary tasks. Electronic content syndication can potentially automate every aspect of online content syndication.
Web publishers can make their content available through syndication by using either RSS and/or Atom technology to produce what is known as 'feeds' ('blog feeds' or 'news feeds'). These feeds can either show headlines only, headlines and summary, or full content.
What is a "newsfeed reader" program?
Rather than manually checking in on each of the weblogs or news sites that you enjoy, you can instead use a newsfeed reader program that will compile all of the latest headlines and excerpts of your favorite sites that have enabled RSS - sometimes known as Really Simple Syndication. With a newsfeed reader you can easily and freely subscribe to content from enabled websites.
For example, say there were several cooking weblogs that interested you. Rather than looking at each one everyday for new content, you could subscribe to their new content - their "news feeds"- in your newsfeed reader program, which with the click of one button would show you a list of the headlines of all new entries from all the sites to which you subscribe. Clicking on the headline would give you an excerpt for the entry and a link to the actual site. This way you could more easily choose to read the entries that interested you the most.
Why is RSS a good thing?
For the content viewer, the ability to subscribe to content using RSS means that you can easily get content that you want without every having to worry about spam. The content doesn't go to your email box, it goes to a news feeder. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to whatever content you want.
For the content provider, you can help popularize your site by making it really easy for people to keep up-to-date with your latest entries.

