Web feeds are useful for keeping up with multiple online information sources. Some common types of feeds are a site's blog posts, all our stories from a particular category (from large categories, like Sports, to small categories, like our Books coverage). The feeds you subscribe let you know when there's new content. The feeds themselves usually consist of a collection of entries, each with a headline and a blurb and a link.

What's the point?

The cool thing about feeds is when they're used right they save you time. Web feeds allow you access to only the information you're interested in and none of the information you're not. Are you only interested in our movie coverage? Instead of surfing to our movie section each day to see if there's a new article, you can subscrib to the movie web feed, which will let you know when there are new articles. This gets more useful the more feeds you subscribe to: instead of going to, say, fifteen different sites, sections or pages to see if there's anything you want to read, now you just go to one place.

What's a web feed reader?

To take advantage of these feeds, you'll need a web feed reader, which is a piece of software that searches the web for feeds. You can customize these readers to just search for articles or sources (like a specific blog, for example, or all the News from the BBC) that you want, and ignore everything else. It's a way to filter through the huge amount of information online and retrieve the stuff that matters most to you.