What Does This Mean?
You may recognize the universal
feed icon or
these “chicklets” from your favorite Web sites, blogs and podcasts.
These icons represent content in any format — text, audio or video —
to which you can subscribe and read/watch/listen using a feed
reader.
What's that?
Why is This a Good Thing?
Technology evolution in online
publishing has made it really easy to not only publish regular
updates to web-based content, but also keep track of a large number
of your favorite Web sites or blogs, without having to remember to
check each site manually or clutter your email Inbox. You can now
streamline your online experience by subscribing to specific content
feeds and aggregating this information in one place to be read when
you're ready.
- Consumer Bottom Line:
Subscribing to feeds makes it possible to review a large amount
of online content in a very short time.
- Publisher Bottom Line:
Feeds permit instant distribution of content and the ability to
make it "subscribable."
- Advertiser Bottom
Line: Advertising in feeds overcomes many of the
shortcomings that traditional marketing channels encounter
including spam filters, delayed distribution, search engine
rankings and general “in-box” noise.
Who publishes feeds?
Most of the biggest names on the
web offer content feeds including
USATODAY.com,
BBC News Headlines,
ABCNews,
CNET, Yahoo!,
Amazon.com (including a
podcast!), and many more. In addition, hundreds of thousands of
bloggers, podcasters and videobloggers publish feeds to keep
themselves better connected to their
readers/listeners/admirers/critics. Apple, through its iTunes Music
Store, offers tens of thousands of audio and video
podcasts for download, each of which is powered by a feed.
How do I read
feeds?
If you want to browse and subscribe
to feeds, you have many choices. Today, there are more than 2,000
different feed reading applications, also known as “news
aggregators” (for text, mostly) or “podcatchers” (for podcasts).
There are even readers that work exclusively on mobile devices.
Some require a small purchase price
but are tops for ease-of-use and ship with dozens of feeds
pre-loaded so you can explore the feed "universe" right away. Free
readers are available as well; a search for "Feed reader" or "Feed
aggregator" at popular search sites will yield many results. A
handful of popular feed readers are listed in the sidebar on this
page.
A typical interface for a feed
reader will display your feeds and the number of new (unread)
entries within each of those feeds. You can also organize your feeds
into categories and even clip and save your favorite entries (with
certain applications).
If you prefer, you can use an
online, web-based service to track and manage feeds. Online services
give you the advantage of being able to access your feed updates
anywhere you can find a web browser. Also, upgrades and new features
are added automatically.
How can I publish my own feeds?
If you have a Web site, 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 likely
publish a feed automatically. Even other, non-blogging sites like
social photo-sharing service
Flickr offer
feeds of content you produce that others can retrieve. There are
also tools on the market that can help transform traditional web
content into the right format for distribution.
FeedBurner's services allow
publishers who already have a feed to improve their understanding of
and relationship with their audience. Once you have a working feed,
run it through FeedBurner and realize a whole new set of benefits.
And finally, some
technical backstory
The new method for easily
distributing online content is often called a web feed and the
technical format that makes it possible is called RSS, which stands
for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, and/or Rockdale,
Sandow, and Southern (Railroad) if you trust the good folks at
AcronymFinder.com. RSS is based on XML, a widely used standard
for textual information exchange between applications on the
Internet. RSS feeds can be viewed as plain text files, but they're
really designed for computer-to-computer communication.
We should point out that RSS is
just one standard for expressing feeds as XML. Another well-known
choice is Atom. Both formats have their boosters, and it does not
appear that consolidation toward a single standard is imminent.
However, most feed subscribers simply want fresh content and don't
care at all about the underlying protocol.
