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News feeds allow you to see when your most visited websites have published new content. You can get the latest article headlines in one place and as soon as they are published and without having to actially go to the websites you have subscribed to the news feed from.
Feeds are also known as RSS. RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication'. Basically, the feeds themselves are just web pages, designed to be read by software rather than people. This software is in the form of Feed Readers such as Google Reader, News Gator or Net News Wire as a few examples.
Most good content management systems come with this feature. They will display a feed of your latest blog posts and articles that your readers can subscribe to using their favourite RSS Reader.
As well as making your content available to your users as and when they want to read it and in the comfort of their own reader - rather than having to visit your site, RSS feeds are also good for SEO. They are picked up by search engines and crawled making it easier for the likes of google to find all your articles and posts.
The BBC News has an excellent explaination of what RSS feeds are and how you can use them on their site. A great starting point for those who really want to understand the potential power of having RSS feeds on their own site.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm
Hope that helps.
Alex
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