Explaining tech to your relatives

Over the past few weeks, as the number of parties I attend reaches its annual apogee, I've been spending a lot of time with some relatives who are not quite as technologically savvy as I am, but who spend a lot of time online and know their way around a web browser.

It just so happened that during the course of conversation, the concept of RSS feeds came up a couple of times. And I discovered that even though it's been around for many years now, RSS is something that the average person has a really hard time understanding. Most people know the familiar orange square, but they're not really sure what it means, or what to do with it.