Neil Gaiman does newbie-friendly RSS–with a text link from his home page to RSS Info:
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a means of distributing Blog summaries in a lightweight XML format to let you keep up with what’s new in Neil’s Journal. You can now set up a desktop aggregator which will grab the RSS feed from this site (and others) and give you a short summary of any new postings that are available…[links to aggregators, more info, etc.]
When not blogging brilliantly about RSS, Neil writes books, including one of my favorite books–Stardust–and (much more famously Sandman and American Gods.