Says the Mozilla RSS Basics tutorial:
RSS (an acronym for “Rich Site Summary” and later coined “Really Simple Syndication”) is a way for web sites to summarize their content, such as news articles, to make it available in a different view.
While Mozilla Thunderbird is how I read RSS feeds, there are lots of alternatives. When you find one you like, Hamtramck Star offers the following RSS feeds:
Hamtramck Star: Posts RSS Feed – All the main post at Hamtramck Star.
Hamtramck Star: Comments RSS Feed – All the comments on all the posts.
Hamtramck Star Calendar: Day RSS Feed – Daily Calendar feed.
Hamtramck Star Calendar: Week RSS Feed – Weekly Calendar feed.
Hamtramck Star Calendar: Month RSS Feed – Monthly Calendar feed.
Hamtramck Star Shopping Forum RSS Feed – All posts on the Shopping Forum.
>> Thunderbird RSS Basics
>> Firefox Live Bookmarks
>> Introduction to Thunderbird (with screencaps)
I really like http://bloglines.com/ I’ve used thunderbird, shrook and netnewswire all of which had their benefits. I settled on bloglines because it’s web-based (think web-based email like gmail) so I could read my feeds from any computer, and because while the interface has a few non-intuitive oddities, I like some aspects of it better than the thunderbird UI.