What is an RSS feed?

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news sites, news-oriented community sites, and personal weblogs.

An RSS file is a structured list of headlines or article titles and descriptions that can be used by other programs or aggregators to pool many RSS "feeds" into one place.

Typically, a user will subscribe to many RSS feeds and then use an aggregator to read them (an aggregator does to RSS feeds what an email client does for email). This is a new way of receiving and consuming information.

RSS was originally started by Dave Winer. The current version is 2.0, and the official specification can be found here.