13 February 2009
Surfing through the net you might have come across terms like "Atom","RSS", "XML". Ever wondered what these links are?

Feeds

Surfing through the net you might have come across terms like "Atom","RSS", "XML". Ever wondered what these links are?
These are collectively called Feeds. A web feed or news feed is a data format or web document used for providing users with frequently updated contents in the form of a shortened or updated or revised version of a webpage created for syndication. Also sometimes referred to as syndicated feed, it is a new method for easily distributing online content usually served at user request.

Feeds allow subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically through a web portal, news reader or in some cases even email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into "widgets," "gadgets," mobile devices, and other bite- sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines
just about anywhere.

Feeds also include ad feeds to shopping engines and paid inclusion ad models. Ad feeds are usually served in Extensible Markup Language (XML) or Rich Site Summary/RDF(Resource Description framework) Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication(RSS)
format.

The kinds of content delivered by a web feed are typically HTML (webpage content) or links to webpages and other kinds of digital media. Often web feeds include summaries of the content in the website rather than the full content itself.
Web feeds are operated by many news websites, weblogs, schools, and podcasters. Feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to "top ten" lists of hit songs to search results. The two main web feed formats are RSS and Atom.

The Icon

You might have seen the universal feed icon in any of your favorite websites, blogs or podcasts. This icon represent content
in any format- text, audio or video - to which you can subscribe and read/watch/listen using a feed reader.

Using Feeds

Feeds work like an automated e-mail program, but the difference is that no e-mail address is needed. The user subscribes
to a particular web feed syndicated by the content distributor, and thereafter receives updated content every time.

A "Feed Reader" is required for using web feeds. A feed reader also known as a feed aggregator, news reader or simply aggregator is a client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing. Making such a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation and this is performed by an Internet aggregator.

A content provider first publishes a feed link on their site which end users can register with an aggregator or feed reader program running on their own machines. Doing this is usually as simple as dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator. When instructed, the aggregator asks all the servers in its feed list if
they have new content.If so, the aggregator either makes a note of the new content or downloads it. Aggregators can be scheduled to check for new content periodically.

Feed Readers may be online like a webmail account or offline. Users can directly subscribe to feeds through aggregators or feed readers. Some modern web browsers incorporate aggregator features. Depending on the aggregator, users can typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or clicking a link in a web browser. Right now, Google News supports Atom 0.3 and RSS 2.0.

Reading feeds

Today, there are more than 2,000 different feed reading applications including:-
a) news aggregators for mostly text,
b) podcatchers for podcasts and
c) feed readers exclusively for mobile devices.

Feed readers are available at small purchase prices as well as free. A search for "Feed reader" or "Feed aggregator"at
popular search sites will yield good results.

A typical interface for a feed reader will display his feeds and the number of new or unread entries within each of those
feeds. The user can also organize his feeds into categories and even clip and save his favorite entries (with certain
applications).

One of the most popular and free web-based feed readers at this point is Bloglines. The first readers were
desktop-based and many of them are still popular like FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, BlogBridge and RSSOwl. A number of e-mail clients can also handle feeds like Outlook 2007 and Thunderbird. Opera, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7.0, and many other web browsers allow receipts of feeds from the tool bar using Live Bookmarks, Favorites, and other techniques to integrate feed reading into a browser.

Feed readers are used in personalized home page services like iGoogle or My Yahoo or My MSN to put content such as news, weather and stock quotes appear on the user’s personal page. Content from other sites can also be added to that personalized page, again using feeds. Organizations can use a Web Feed Server behind their firewall to distribute, manage and track the use of internal and external web feeds by users and groups.

Who publishes feeds?

Top names on the web including USATODAY.com,BBC News Headlines, ABCNews, CNET, Yahoo!, Amazon.com (including a podcast!),
Google News,Apple,etc. In addition, hundreds of thousands of bloggers,podcasters, and videobloggers publish feeds to keep
themselves better connected to their users.

Publishing feeds

If you have a website, blog, audio/video content, or even photos, you can offer a feed of your content as an option. If you
are using a popular blogging platform or publishing tool like TypePad, Wordpress, or Blogger, you can likely publish a feed
automatically. Even other non-blogging sites like Flickr offer feeds of content you produce that others can retrieve.

Advantages of feeds over E-mail

Web feeds have many advantages compared to email:

1) For Consumers subscribing to feeds:
a) They can review a large amount of online content in a very short time.
b) Users need not worry about the threats associated with email like spam, phishing, viruses or identity theft as
they are not required to disclose their identity while subscribing to feeds.
c) There is no need for sending an "unsubscribe" request to stop receiving news,as users can simply remove the feed from their aggregator to stop receiving it.
d) The feed items are automatically "sorted" so that each feed URL has its own set of entries unlike an email box
where all mails are in one big pile and has to be sorted.

2) For publishers:
a) Feeds permit instant distribution of content and the ability to make it "subscribable."
b) Web feeds can also be used to automatically transfer information from one website to another, without any human intervention as they are designed to be machine-readable rather than human-readable.
c) Web feed content may be shared and republished by other websites. Hence one popular definition of RSS is Really Simple Syndication.
d) As more and more internet users come upon your feeds on many different sites, your website gets more hits,
your rankings increase and that can change a lot of things for you.
e) If you are using an online web-based service to track and manage your feeds,there is the added advantage of being able to access your feed updates from anywhere there is a web browser.
f) Also, upgrades and new features are added automatically.

3) )For Advertisers:
a) Advertising in feeds overcomes many of the shortcomings that traditional marketing channels encounter
including spam filters.
b) Feeds can easily solve the traditional problem of delayed distribution.
c) Feeds can improve search engine rankings and thus promote marketing to greater heights.
d) Feeds can also overcome the problem of general inbox noise.

Disadvantage

A web feed is usually made available by the same person that created the content for the website. However, not all websites
might provide a feed. The biggest disadvantage of feeds is that sometimes third parties reading the content of the website
may create a feed for it by scraping it. This can lead to controversies as it might distribute the content in a manner
entirely different from what the website owner might have intended.

Difference between Web feed and RSS

Though the term RSS is usually used to refer to web feeds or web syndication in general, not all feed formats are now RSS. For example, the Blogspace description of using web feeds in an aggregator is headlined "RSS info" and "RSS readers" even
though its first sentence makes clear the inclusion of the Atom format: "RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer. "