Camille Boulière
Syndication is now well implemented on internet. It allows you not to be forced to visit a website, everyday, to be informed about its updates.
It's of course not a problem when you are following a few websites... however when you begin to follow a large number of those, you can, thanks to a little software, see directly whom has been up-dated and, generally, read a summary.
Thus, you don't need to visit all websites you find interesting.
To make it work, webmasters who wants it create some files, these files are formated in a certain way. They will be read by specific softwares.
These softwares will verify regullary if the file has been updated. If yes it will display a summary of each updated part and will notify you about it.
There are two main formats used for this : Atom and RSS.
For about all systems (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MacOS, windows, etc.)
These are Free softwares (free in the sens of freedom), and only the ones who support Atom and RSS are listed.