How to explain rss to normal people.

This is how I have explained RSS for the past 4-5 years:

Question: Simplifying greatly, what are the 2 ways you can get a newspaper/periodical/magazine?

Answer: One way is for you to go buy the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Pull). The other is for the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Push) to be delivered to you whenever it is published.

RSS is similar to getting the newspaper delivered to you, and hence saving you from hitting refresh or checking a website to see if it has been updated.

Similar to email, RSS needs a reader/client to read these updates, and these readers/clients could be similar to microsoft outlook or yahoo/gmail/hotmail.

Actually, rss is reasonably mainstream. You don't have to explain rss to normal people!

Most of my non-hacker friends use some sort of feed reader. They know that RSS lets them read blog posts in their feedreader without visiting the blog, even though they may not know the format specifications.

RSS needs to be integrated into email clients, not web browsers. RSS's "notification" use cases are closer to email, even in the terminology ("subscribe"). If there was better support in email clients, RSS would see more use for things like ecommerce shipment notifications, website and ecommerce "newsletters" (which often get marked as spam when sent as email) and the like. The user remains in "control" then, unlike email spam, because they can unsubscribe by grabbing the feed anymore. Reach statistics would be more accurate too (for the same content that was traditionally delivered via email).

Honestly, I still think RSS is useless to normal people.