Communication has always been the life blood of success. It was the Athenian runner that ran all night to bring news from the battle of marathon. Upon his arrival and his report of the news that they had won the battle the messenger promptly died.

The stock market lives and breathes on information and its timely access. Business decisions are made with more clarity and success when the information is available and the CEO’s of the large companies understand this, demanding information now, right now!

This culture has filtered through our world and information is the most marketable commodity on sale today. The highest prices paid are those for information with huge corporations being built on the collection and dissemination of this information.

The first opportunity to spread information was the letter. When the Dutch East India Company traveled between Europe and India letters were left under a rock at the tip of Africa in the hope that another ship going the other way would pick up the mail and then spend a few more months as they sailed slowly to their destination to deliver the letters.

Pony post was another step in the communication evolution as riders would throw a satchel full of mail over their shoulder and gallop the gauntlet of Red Indian arrows to deliver the news and information.

As our world grew in technological competence so communication became easier. The wire the telephone and then email. Electronic communication was launched with the ability to instantaneously send communication around the world and back again.

Along with the ability to communicate so quickly came a host of problems that sprang up. One of the major problems was caused by unscrupulous people that send unsolicited email which we have labeled as spam. This spam fills our time and buries us in pointless advertising and more information then we can understand. It takes time to filter through what we want to read and what is junk which needs to be deleted.

Fortunately the same wonderful intellect and technology that brought us all this communication time sapping mess has come to our rescue and has delivered us RSS feeds.

Now that I have spun out the history that has led to this new technology let me explain what a RSS feed is. RSS is an acronym for about 3 different sentences describing what it is. So I am not even going to say what they are as it is the propensity of geeks to dream up words and acronyms for what they dream up in the middle of the night.

But how does this new technology affect each one of us and how do we use it.

What a feed is is the ability for some one that has information to place it into a format that is readable by a particular type of software. These readers can then take the information that you would like to receive and allows you to receive that information. The beauty of the feed is that you do not share your contact details with any one. There is no way for the person who is sending out the information to know anything about you, and it is as easy as one click for you to get rid of the information that they send you.

So how does one get a RSS feed. The first thing you need is a reader. The easiest one to use is google reader. There are however heaps of readers out there and most browsers provide a feed reader including Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

Now that you have picked your feed reader you need to go and find the feeds that provide the information that you are looking for. When you come across the internet site that has the information that is relevant to what you are interested in then look for the little orange button with what looks like impulse waves rippling across its face.

When you click on this button it will take you to a page where you can select the reader that you have decided to use. Suddenly you have Real Syndication happening to your PC with out the spam and with the confidentiality. And what is more; you can upload it to your iPod, PDA etc and walk around the street be on the train or where ever reading your new feeds.

It will probably take you about quarter of the time it took you to read this article to set up a RSS reader and a feed that you like. The beauty is you now have an anonymous method of receiving all the information you would like. The question from here is how much information can you handle; and how long will it take before the bad people figure out how to break your reader and spam you again. In which case I think I will probably give up like the runner from marathon.

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