Everything you ever wanted to know about RSS and automated alerts
E-mail notifications/alerts
Alerts can be used to filter information from the web that matches a certain predefined query (e.g., "food prices") and send out an automated e-mail notification (user can decide how often alert is sent out).
Examples:
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a Web format that allows for content to be easily shared across different sites and is mostly used by blogs and news sites to provide their readers with updates.
Why use RSS?
Subscribing to a site's RSS feed allows you to view and read updates from sites in a single, easy-to-use location using a service called a "Newsreader."
This saves a lot of time and effort from the old and slow way of going to each website individually to see if any updates have been made. So, instead of checking a couple of sites regularly, you can either follow a lot more new information on the Web or simply invest more time in other, more productive pursuits.
How do I use it?
1. Make an account at an RSS reader website. (Listed below)
2. Find websites you are interested in.
3. Click on these little orange icons: 
For example, scroll to the bottom of this page, and look at the bottom-right corner.
Overview:
Which reader should I use?
There are many publicly available RSS readers on the internet. We recommend that you check out the following services and choose for yourself.
The following are web-based RSS readers:
RSS feeds can also be aggregated to Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer 7.
For a complete list, go to List of feed aggregators.
Recommended Resources
There are several tools that start addressing the problem of information overload in trying to improve the noise-signal ratio of all the information we can access through the internet:
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