By using an FeedCluster.com Aggregator Hosting, updates to your favourite sites can be collected in one place for easy viewing in near-real time. One popular web-based aggregator is Google Reader.

For bloggers and other web site publishers, RSS is a valuable tool to promote online content. As a blogger, I want as many people as possible to be able to read my content. As a result, I offer my content in RSS format in addition to my “traditional” XHTML format.

Subscribers to my RSS feed get the content (almost) immediately after it is published, whereas “traditional” web surfers must visit my site or follow a link in order to discover that there is new content.

When RSS was still a new and widely underused technology (and many would argue that it still is), publishers needed a way to advertise their feeds to readers. In a rare move of openness and cooperativeness, Microsoft helped to establish a standardized icon by using Mozilla’s feed icon.

The current thinking among most web designers is that a site should include a large, prominent variation on the standard icon, styled to look good with the overall theme. This large icon is generally placed at or near the top of every page. The purpose for this larger icon is to entice more readers to subscribe to the site’s feed.