What are these things called feeds?
April 11th, 2008 by Greg Rogan
Web feeds - also known as Atom or RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds - allow you to read and keep up to date with new content from multiple sources (websites, blogs, wikis etc).
A feed is provided by the site publisher so that you can read the site content without having to visit the website. The feed contains a section for each new article (or item) which contains the title, link and the full or partial content of the article.
To follow a feed, you should subscribe to the feed in a Feed Reader (sometimes called an aggregator). Feed Readers periodically check the subscribed feeds for new items. When you open or log-in to your Feed Reader, it will display the new items from your feeds.
Here is an example of a Feed Reader called Bloglines. The 6 feeds that have been subscribed to are displayed on the left and articles on the right
Why not subscribe to email updates or just go to the website?
Consider you had thirty websites that you wanted to check for content updates. It is true that you could bookmark those sites in a web browser and check them every day. That would, however, be time consuming by having to open each site, click around and manually scan for changes in content. Even if those sites offered email updates, firstly you would have to give your email address out to them - increasing the risk of spam should they pass your email address on, and if you changed your email address, you would need to go back to each site and update them with your new address. Secondly the email updates are mixed in with all your other emails making it a bit of an effort to find old articles.
With web feeds, just visit each site once, identify and add the site’s feed to your Feed Reader, open your Feed Reader daily, scan article headlines and read only the articles that interest you.
Feed Readers
There are three categories of tools that allow you to read feeds:
| Advantages | Disadvantages | Examples | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web-based |
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| Standalone application |
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Windows
Mac
Linux
Mobile/PDA
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| Browser based |
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Web feeds in Government
Reading web feeds
If your desktop is locked down such that you can’t install a Feed Reader application and your web browser/email program does not have the ability to read feeds (this is common with a Windows XP/Office 2003/Internet Explorer 6 setup), then the easiest option is to use a web-based reader.
Some web feeds in Government
Advanced uses of web feeds
Web feeds can have more advanced uses than just reading new articles. Just a few examples are:
- watch for new video posts by your favorite Youtube user
- see comments posted about an article or blog that you are interested in
- watch for content changes in a wiki page
- be notified when someone sent you an event invitation in Facebook
- watch for must-have items on Ebay using RSS Auction
- learn a new word every day from Dictionary.com
- watch for events added to a public Google Calendar
- follow your favorite comic strips on Tapestry Comics
Summary
Web feeds are a convenient way for websites to push content to you rather than you having to do all the browsing and clicking around. Feed Readers give you one place to go to keep track of all the articles that are of interest to you. Since subscribing to feeds only requires you to enter a web address into the Feed Reader, there is a danger of collecting too many feeds and spending all your day reading them! It pays to frequently assess your collection of feeds and delete ones that are no longer relevant to your interests. I suggest trying one of the readers in the above list - web based readers are the easiest as they don’t require installation of any software.
Web feeds are becoming increasingly popular as a way of delivering content to users. Once you have tried web feeds you will never go back to email subscriptions - that’s for sure!
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