Web feed
Web feed
Overview
A web feed, often referred to as a news feed or RSS feed, is a way to provide content (i.e., text, images, audio, video) to users and other websites when content is updated regularly. The feed itself is simply a format for exchanging information between websites and online applications. The two most common ways to read web feeds are: 1) on a personal feed reader where users subscribe to a number of feeds (e.g., Google Reader) and 2) on an aggregator website which collects and presents information from various sources and presents them similarly to newspapers or magazines, often sorted by publication date (e.g., Google News).
Strengths
Web feeds are an excellent tool for sharing basic information and updates with individuals and other websites. Unlike email, users do not need to provide an email address and content is easily shared among websites. Furthermore, content does not flood inboxes. Rather, it is stored and accessible at the reader's convenience.
Weaknesses
Web feeds usually provide only a few basic pieces of information about content items, so additional tools (e.g., static or dynamic websites, databases) may be required to fully describe many types of information. For example, feeds could notify users of a new monitoring program added to a database. However, it would be far more difficult to provide the actual data from that monitoring program via a web feed.
Examples
Southeast Partners in Flight uses a web feed on its website to summarize relevant bird conservation news by automatically collecting and combining news items from regional and national web feeds (http://sepif.org/content/view/38/39/).
Tutorials
1) Using web feeds: Two of the most popular feed readers are Google Reader (http://www.google.com/help/reader/tour.html) and Microsoft Outlook (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA101595391033.aspx)
2) Creating web feeds: The feed itself is a constantly updated file on the website that contains basic information about content items. For example, a feed for a news item will usually contain the title of the article, a short summary, a link to the full article, and the date it was added to the site. Many popular tools for creating dynamic websites (e.g., Joomla, Ning, Google Sites) have built-in support for web feeds, and there are inexpensive add-ons to other programs that lack integrated web feed support (e.g., RSS Dreamfeeder (http://www.rnsoft.com/en/products/rssdreamfeeder/) for Adobe Dreamweaver).
Further reading
This publication is dynamic in that it will continue to be improved, updated, and expanded over time. Suggestions for improving the content, organization, and scope of this publication are encouraged and can be contributed here (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NP3Y772).