It’s a fair question. Keeping it simple (because that way I can understand it):
RSS is short for either “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”, depending on who’s telling you about it. It’s a way to “syndicate” your blog, making it available to many more readers than would normally see it because it was merely linked to in someone’s blog or web page. Producing an RSS version of your blog makes it possible to send it as “news headlines” (or in longer formats if desired) to one of the various news aggregator sites where blogophiles and others can quickly gather information from websites and blogs that interest them. If your blog interests a person, he or she can have his or her news aggregator software pick up your blog immediately when it’s freshly published. (This whole thing is an oversimplification of many more complex issues, and I beg the indulgence of bloggers far more educated in RSS than I am.)
Publishing a blog in an RSS version involves taking a normal HTML-formatted blog and turning it into one formatted in XML instead (see here for what an XML page can look like). There are various formats or “flavors” of RSS: 2.0 is the newest one: Blog*Spot uses 0.91. There are a lot of issues about RSS publication which I don’t yet understand, having other things to think about all day, like books and cats and husbands, and sheep not eating my rosemary bush again this year (it’s spring…the lambs get in through the fence, and their moms follow them, and eat my garden…). But I’m working on it.
More general data can be found here and here and here and here and here.
Now excuse me, because I swear I can hear sheep in the front yard again —
