What is a web feed?

A web feed or news feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by a news aggregator. A web feed is also sometimes referred to as a syndicated feed.

A typical scenario of web-feed use might involve the following: a content provider publishes a feed link on its site which end users can register with an aggregator program (also called a feed reader or a news reader) 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. One can schedule aggregators to check for new content periodically.

Web feeds exemplify pull technology, although they may appear to push content to the user.

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 when websites provide web feeds to notify users of content updates, they only include summaries in the web feed rather than the full content itself.

What’s the point on web feed? 

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 subscribe 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, a piece of software that searches the web for XML files. 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.

Uses of Web Feeds

Web feeds have some advantages compared to receiving frequently published content via an email:

• Users do not disclose their email address when subscribing to a feed and so are not increasing their exposure to threats associated with email: spam, viruses, phishing, and identity theft.
• Users do not have to send an unsubscribe request to stop receiving news. They simply remove the feed from their aggregator.
• The feed items are automatically sorted in that each feed URL has its own sets of entries (unlike an email box where messages must be sorted by user-defined rules and pattern matching).

In its explanation "What is a web feed?", the publishing group of Nature describes two benefits of web feeds:

1. It makes it easier for users to keep track of our content...This is a very convenient way of staying up to date with the content of a large number of sites.
2. It makes it easier for other websites to link to our content. Because RSS feeds can easily be read by computers, it's also easy for webmasters to configure their sites so that the latest headlines from another site's RSS feed are embedded into their own pages, and updated automatically. 

Confusion between web feed and RSS

The term RSS is often used to refer to web feeds or web syndication in general, although not all feed formats are RSS. The Blog space description of using web feeds in an aggregator, for example, is headlined "RSS info" and "RSSreaders" 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.

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