Full Explanation of what a Web Feed is

Jul 8th, 2007 by Charles

A Web Feed is a data format used for serving the users frequently updated contents. The content distributors like us who are bloggers will syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe it. Hence, it’s making possible to aggregate all the feeds together under one roof to read all the contents in a feed reader (also known as aggregator program). It will be scheduled periodically to look for the latest feeds the users have subscribed.

History of Feed
Feed is a xml file where it used to be a “database” file for sending from program to program for certain functions without touching on the database queries. It is now being widely used as the same way for the feeds.

Difference in Feeds
There are two types:

RSS: Either in .xml or .rss file.
1. Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
2. RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)
3. Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
Atom: Either in .xml or .atom file.

The main motivation for the development of Atom was dissatisfaction with RSS. Among other things, there are multiple incompatible and widely adopted versions of RSS. The intention was to ease the difficulty of developing applications with web syndication feeds. (Check Wikipedia for the comparison.)

Web Feed Logo
The standardisation of a web feed logo is adopted from Firefox when the Microsoft RSS team made an announcement about it. Here’s how it looks below:

Advantages of a feed subscription
Users do not need to give their email contacts to the content distributors. Making it clear for the users that they are getting the contents the same anonymous way as when they visit the website itself.

When the users do not wish to read anymore, they can simply unsubscribe it, removing the feed from their feed reader.

Feed contents can be sorted much easily in the way a feed reader can do for the users.

Can Feeds Make You Money?
Google Adsense does not get their way into the feeds after all. However, feedburner.com does able to make you money but it is not that much for a month… Might be only $50 a month on an average…

Find out some ways to attract the readers to come back to your blog for some activities such as participating in contests for great prizes, give them some free gifts for certain posts such as free ebooks, software and embedded video to watch.

How To Attract People To Subscribe You

Put in a full feed for your subscribers to read them all! If you don’t have a full feed, it can be hard to read it in a reader.. Why should I feed it then?
Forget about showing your numbers of subscribers when yours is still small… Sometimes, it can be a psychology that this is not a good blog after all.
Make sure your feed icon is huge enough to be visible to the people!
Put in a line of asking people to subscribe to your feed in every post. It helps!
Continue to give great contents! When people find it a hassle to visit all the good blogs, they would want to subscribe it and read it all in one reader…

Ways of Attracting People to Come Back To Your Blog
Now, you might want to attract the force back to your blog again… That’s probably because feedburner ads can’t really earn you a lot, and people who subscribe you might not come back again…

Turn on Your FeedFlare in your FeedBurner… Allow them to see the activities in the number of comments so that they can give their comments too!
Have some related links in your posts… That should bring in the readers to read certain related posts!
Turning off full feed to let the readers come to your blog for more… John Chow recommended not to do it.. I also recommend not to do it too. The main purpose of a feed is to give your readers full control.

List of Feed Readers Available