I was asked today what an RSS feed is? I take for granted using RSS on my phone and computers and use a lot of site feeds for my favourite subjects to give me instant information no matter where I am. This got me thinking that there is a lot of non technical people out there who dont really use RSS feeds and do not know what the benefits of using RSS feeds can bring.

Simply put an RSS feed means Really Simple Syndication. How easy is that! To make it simpler your facebook latest news from your friends works in the same way. It syndicates the data from multiple sources into one handy update feed.

So how do you get access to these handy snippets of information? Well when you visit a most web sites you will see a little orange icon, which looks like this =>

This is an RSS feed link if you click on this it will give a list of blogs and data the site administrators want you to read, some sites have lots of RSS feeds for diffrent types of data but for the purpose of this tutorial we will use one.

Ok so you have list of sites and blogs you like that you want to get updates on Great! Just follow the steps below to get some great data added to your Android Phone.

1. Create Google RSS Reader account
2. Add your RSS feeds to Google Reader
3. Android RSS Readers

Create your RSS Reader.
First you should collect your RSS feeds in a reader, there are lots of RSS feed readers out there for desktop applications and Android. I am sure some people will have there own preference but I like being able to use Google services and creating account is easy. Just login with your Gmail / Android account details and get your account set up. http://www.google.com/reader/

Subscribe to your feeds.
Click on the big orange SUBSCRIBE box at the top left and this will expose a field to put your RSS feed in. Copy and paste the URL from your favourite sites links, as an example it will look something like this..
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NAMEOFRSSFEED

Click the ADD button and the content from the feed will appear in the main content and a link under your subscriptions on the left hand side, now go mad and add as many as you like. If you get lots of feeds then you should consider making folders, the links can be dragged and dropped into folders to create multiple categories.

One handy thing I love about Google Reader is that it can suggest and share your favourite links. Click the link Subscriptions at the top there is a button for Feed settings, this will give you a drop down menu. On this menu it will have a tab for 'more like this'. This handy option will offer you some similar feeds that you can add to your subscription.

Android RSS Applications.
Ok so you have a nice collection of feeds stored in Google, but what now?

As I already mentioned there are hundreds of RSS readers that you can add to your Google reader. I am going to talk about a couple of my favourites, please feel free to suggest alternatives below.

Pulse is an RSS feed reader for Android  I love it as it creates a magazine type of layout and updates in the background, You can choose feeds from your Google RSS feed reader by logging in from the App and they also suggest trending and popular news feeds. When you install the Application it comes with some standard pages and suggested feeds. Personally I created several of my own groups.

I am also a fan of the Pure News widget I find this is a handy widget for my home screens is easy to theme in the widget settings. It has a lot of preferences which make it a really versatile widget if you are like me and like your widgets to look and work to fit your home screen settings.

There are quite a few options and you only have to look at the Google market list for RSS feeds to see that this is a massive area that is constantly changing, to trial some of these apps is a good idea.

If you find any really good applications or widgets please let me know below.