Those little orange buttons mean a new way to get news

LIKE me, you may have witnessed in the last few months the proliferation of little orange buttons emblazoned with the letters "RSS" or "XML" on travel websites. Although I knew in theory what kind of information these buttons might bring to my computer desktop, in practice I just didn't get it. Knowing that the acronym RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication didn't make it one bit simpler to understand.

So I set out to find what we non-geek but still savvy Internet users need to know about this new way of customizing the travel information we can receive on our computers.

First, RSS is a tool that lets you subscribe to a particular type of information that you wish to receive. It's similar to an e-mail subscription, but if a particular news item fed to your desktop does not interest you, you simply ignore it (unlike e-mail that demands you act on it in some way -- read it, delete it, get mad and try desperately to unsubscribe). This goes a long way to explain the no-hassle appeal of RSS. Most of us have grown weary of in-boxes clogged with information.

"People who tend more toward RSS than e-mail want to be in control" of the information they receive, said Laura Johnston, vice president of customer loyalty at Travelocity, which for three months has been testing its own RSS feed promoting deals. (You can access it at this point only by going to rss.travelocity.com).

Second, RSS and XML are, for the purpose of understanding the feeds, the same thing. No difference.

And third, and most problematic, it's still a little rough around the edges on some websites. But it is getting better.

Perhaps the simplest way to understand RSS is to use AOL as an example. The welcome page on AOL acts as a news feeder to your desktop. News headlines appear as hyperlinks that you can click on to take you to a webpage for the full story. The difference between AOL's news feeder and an RSS news feeder is that you customize it, getting information only from the sources that you specify.

I set out to create my own RSS news feeders for travel information using My Yahoo (www.yahoo.com). Other news feeders are available. (Orbitz has a good list with links to some of the more popular ones on its RSS page -- click on the RSS button on Orbitz's home page -- but My Yahoo is free and user friendly.)

More than 30 million people have created My Yahoo pages since their public launch in September 2004, and there are about 20 million RSS feeds with My Yahoo buttons, said Yahoo spokeswoman Meagan Busath.