One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that there are lots of great sites out there, publishing awesome new things on a regular basis. For example, there’s a huge variety of constantly-updated news services, like TV services from CNN to the BBC and newspapers from Auckland to Vancouver.

But this creates a problem — if you try to keep up with the new items on more than a few of these sites, you have to keep visiting them one by one to see if there’s anything new to read. So if you like to read the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Sydney Morning Herald, you have to visit three different sites each day.

Likewise, if your friends Alice and Bob have blogs, while Catherine has a LiveJournal and David has a MySpace page, you have to constantly visit each one separately to keep up with what they’re all writing.

Obviously, this can get a bit tedious if you have more than a few sites that you like to keep an eye on. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just visit one page to see all of the new things on every blog or news site you like, rather than having to manually go to lots of pages?

That’s exactly what “RSS feeds” allow you to do. An RSS feed (or an Atom feed, which is a close sibling) is a special version of a Web page designed to be read by a computer program. Almost all blogs and news sites offer RSS feeds, as do media sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube, and sites that frequently post new versions of software.

If you take an RSS feed from each of the sites that you like to visit, and then add them into a program called a feed reader, you can see a summary of new items from all of the different feeds at once without having to visit separate Web pages. To get the full story, you can just click on any link to be taken to the original site.

Some RSS readers work on your computer as a separate program on your desktop, while others are Web-based applications that you can use on anyone’s computer provided you log in. Feedeye is an example of this second category. To use Feedeye, you gather RSS feeds from sites you like to visit into a “set”, and we produce one page that contains the new items from all of them.

For info on how this works, consult the overview tour. Or to learn more about RSS feeds, try the introductory articles from Software Garden, Feedster, or the BBC.