What Are Web Feeds?

Web feeds are special files, which can be read by almost any computer, and are often used to transfer and deliver important information, news updates, and more. These items can be received by any of several applications known as readers or aggregators. Once the information has been received, an aggregator will display the feed in a more easily readable and "user friendly" format.

Internet users can subscribe to web feeds and get automatic updates, made to the web feed, as soon as they are published. Users can many times view these updates online, in the case of news updates, or you can download the information to your computer, as would be the case if you had a subscription to a podcast or vidcasts. The process is known as syndication and users can access all the information from one place on a home computer, rather than have to access dozens of websites to skim materials; many times the feeds will contain short summaries of the articles and information available, and to finish reading the content you will have to click through to the website. With web feeds users can now receive any kind of content including news headlines, blog posts, lists, podcasts, and vidcasts (video podcasts).

So what is RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is an XML-based format for sharing and distributing Web content. RSS has become the dominant choice for creating web feeds across the Internet. Users can usually recognize the availability of a RSS/XML feed on a website by the appearance of an orange RSS icon. Although there is no standard icon for RSS feeds, most websites display them as orange. Webmasters have come up with as many unique icons for RSS feeds, as they have come up with uses for the feeds themselves. RSS icons are easily identifiable once a user is familiar with what they are looking for.