This article might help.
If you want to use RSS, then you can use get an RSS reader or a mail client like Thunderbird which comes with one included. What I like about RSS readers is that I can get news/updates from many sites really fast, and only choose to read the news that interest me the most in detail.
As a developer, RSS also has some advantages which I think are addressed in the article I linked to above. If that's not enough, here are other references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html http://www.webreference.com/authorin...xml/rss/intro/