Web Feed

A web feed (or news feed, or syndicated 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 client software called an aggregator (also called a feed reader or a news reader), which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based.

Technically, a web feed is a document (often XML-based) whose discrete content items include web links to the source of the content. News websites and blogs are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to top-ten lists of hit tunes to search results. The two main web feed formats are RSS and Atom.

A typical scenario of web feed use is: a content provider publishes a feed link on their site which end users can register with an aggregator program running on their own machines. Aggregators can be scheduled to check for new content periodically. Web feeds are an example of pull technology, although they may appear to push content to the user.

Benefits

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 (unlike an email box where messages must be sorted by user-defined rules and pattern matching).