What is a content feed?

A content feed, also called RSS feed or XML feed, is a way of making up-to-date information from a website available to other websites and programs.  A content feed generally contains several items, each of which can have a title (headline), a description (summary), and a link back to a relevant page on the originating website.  If the originating website is a news source, then the content feed could deliver headlines and summaries of recent news stories.  If the website is a  blog, then the content feed could deliver recent postings to the blog.

Feeds are read by an application variously called a feed reader, a news reader, or a news aggregator.  Some feed readers are programs which run on your computer, while others such as My Yahoo! are web-based.  The Firefox browser has a feature called Live Bookmarks,  which reads feed headlines and presents them as bookmarks.