If you're anything like me, your daily routine includes checking for updates on the sites of The New York Times, Slate magazine, Wired magazine, the tech site Slashdot, friends' blogs, Penn State Live and the Mac rumor site ThinkSecret, among others.

A relatively new Web technology promises to make such repetitive tasks far easier.

The technology, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), allows Web sites to syndicate news and content so it is instantly available to the world.

Instead of going to the Times' site every few hours to check for updates, I simply tell an application or Web site to notify me when updates are available. Think of it as having information "pushed" to me as needed rather than having me "pull" it at arbitrary times.

The applications and Web sites are usually called "news aggregators" because they have the ability to bring together multiple such feeds into one convenient view.

RSS has made the process of spreading information much faster and easier.

Nearly every blog on the Web today has an RSS "feed" available, and this is probably the most popular way to access blog content. Rather than bookmarking a bunch of sites and then having to remember to visit them, you can set your aggregator to check the RSS feed for updates at set intervals -- every 15 minutes, three hours, two weeks, whatever.

You can have your aggregator check hundreds of sites, and even if only a few update with any regularity, you'll still always have the latest news. It's pretty convenient, and it's beginning to go mainstream.

I wrote earlier about how the popular open-source Web browser Firefox has a built-in RSS reader. If you use Firefox to visit Slate.com, you'll see an orange logo appear on the lower-right corner of the browser window.

This means Slate magazine offers an RSS feed that provides the article headline, a short description and a link to the full story on the Web page, should you be interested in reading it in its totality (but really, who has the time to read full magazine articles anymore?).

I recommend using Firefox to browse some of your favorite sites to see if RSS feeds are available. You can also search for feeds at Syndic8.com, Feeds4all.com and Everyfeed.com, where literally millions of feeds (of varying quality, of course) are categorized and made available to the public.

You can use the RSS reader built in to Firefox, but there are other methods that are far more powerful. I prefer to use the Bloglines.com service. Once you establish a free account there, you can add any number of RSS feeds, then group these feeds into various folders or categories to make information easier to find.

When you log in, you can quickly see how many new items are available for each of your RSS feeds -- they almost look like new e-mail messages in Microsoft Outlook.

There are several other Web-based aggregators available, such as NewsIsFree.com, which have the benefit of making your RSS feeds available to you no matter which computer you are on.

Another option is to use an RSS-reading application running on your home computer, which generally will reduce the number of Web advertisements and the like that you are exposed to.

Some of the more popular RSS aggregators are SharpReader and Radio UserLand for Windows and NetNewsWire for Macintosh.

Frankly, I think all newspapers could benefit from an RSS feed. It would be a great way for a newspaper to make itself available to readers who don't like to look through the print edition and don't remember to check the Web site every day. The newspaper could also make it possible to post comments for every story, and then make RSS feeds of each message board available, a practice that is becoming quite common on some sites.

Like that of many technologies, RSS usage is increasing at an exponential rate, and I expect that it won't be too long until nearly all of us are using news aggregators as our primary means of getting information.

Dents in the universe usually aren't made by any single event, but rather by a brilliant new idea that, in retrospect, is profoundly obvious.

RSS feeds represent such an idea, and I encourage you to investigate them further.