When I breach the subject with many of my friends- even the tech-savvy ones- RSS seems like just another imposing internet acronym that requires admitting you’re a dummy and buying a yellow book at Border’s to master.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is actually everything it claims to be. Instead of having to visit your 10 favorite websites every single morning, wouldn’t it be nice to have all of that content laid out on one page just for you?

Like most things on the web, it’s just a matter of finding the right tool to take full advantage of all the technology has to offer. Google Reader was a favorite of early adopters, and is still a pretty decent tool.

I, however, am fully on board with Netvibes, a slick RSS feed aggregator from those lovers of romance, red wine, and butter: the French. For anyone who has used MyYahoo before, you have an idea of what a feed aggregator is. Take content from all over the web and display it on one page. Like your own personal newspaper. RSS is the delivery mechanism to your aggregator of choice.

I like Netvibes because it’s simple. First off, you don’t need to go hunting for the specific RSS address for content from a certain website (like this page at the LA Times). You can just type in the basic web address of a blog, newspaper site, or forum that you like and it will give you a list of all available feeds from that main address.

Next, organization of all your content is as easy as dragging and dropping. And they also have their own list of recommended feeds and “widgets” - or applications that they have come up with. One allows you to search all of the major web-based video sites at once. They have a similar one for photos and for blog content.

Lastly, and probably best of all in terms of separating Netvibes from other aggregators, you can view the actual webpage. One of the frustrations with RSS feeds, especially for big newspaper sites, is that they’ll only give you the first bit of the article to encourage you clicking to their site for the rest and generating a hit. Netvibes allows you to see the original content, in all of it’s organizational and image-laden glory, as the creators wanted you to see it.

Once you’re setup, you just need to look for the RSS logo on a page.

Wherever you see it, there’s a feed. Just click it and you will be redirected to Netvibes and asked to confirm adding the feed to your page. You can also create multiple pages to segregate content types.

But sometimes, you don’t want to read the entire newspaper. You just want something like the little ticker on CNN, delivering headlines only, but with the ability to choose any story at will and read the entire piece.

Enter Snackr. A feed aggregator of a different sort, it was designed using Adobe AIR, which  can basically be used to create slick-looking applications that run on your desktop (regardless of your operating system) and pull content dynamically from the web.

Snackr is a ticker for your desktop that you customize with whatever RSS feeds you want. For bloggers, it’s a dream as you can let it run all day on the side of your desktop and anytime you see something you like, you can drill right to it. It’s easy to use, looks great, and is customizable enough in terms of appearance and placement that it doesn’t get annoying.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and aggregate.