In short, a feed is a way of getting the latest news and additions to a website without having to visit the website.

 

Instead of having to check the website daily to see if any new items have been added, you can subscribe to a feed and have the news delivered to you!

 

What's more, many sites around the web (particularly blogs) provide feeds, so you can keep an eye on news from hundreds of different sources at once if you want to.  If you see a site that mentions RSS, Atom, XML or Syndication, it's probably refering to a type of feed.

 

All you need is a feed reader of some sort.  You have many options.  If you've never tried feeds before, the simplest way to get started might be to use a browser-based feed manager such as those provided by Google  or Bloglines.  Or, if you're using Mozilla Firefox as your browser, you can use one of the feed reader extensions such as Wizz RSS or Xenu.  Or, there are programs you can download and install to work with Microsoft Outlook - more complete introductions to feeds and feed readers can be found courtesy of SixApart and the BBC.

 

Once your feed reader is set up, all that remains is to drag or cut and paste the link from  those little 'RSS' or 'ATOM' images on the left into your reader!