What is… A Feed?

All blogs have feeds (also known as RSS feeds - or Really Simple Syndication feeds). These are, in essence, “signals” sent out to say when the blog has been updated. The signal “pings” (notifies) feed aggregators (sites that collect - or aggregate - feeds) when the blog owner posts something on the blog. As the blog owner, you can turn your feed off eg if you don’t want public sites to be notified of your update. The feed for a given site usually looks something like this: http://www.nameofblogsite.com/feed. The link to a blog’s feed is usually identified by a feed “chicklet” ie a small square-ish button with a stylised radio signal on it.

Subscribe in a reader

As a reader or visitor to a blog, you can grab the feed so that you can receive notifications of future updates on that blog. You can do this by “susbscribing” via a news or blog reader - I will talk about to use these “readers” in more detail in another post. Briefly, it is a site where you can read the blogs that you have subscribed to in one place. It looks similar to your email programme and you can usually arrange your subscriptions into folders under topics of your choice. You can also subscribe to feeds from newspapers or other news providers eg Reuters so you can read the news from the same place. I will be writing more about how to use a blog “reader” in another post.

As a blog owner, you can use your feed to offer email notifications to your visitors. You activate your feed in an email notification programme that generates a subscription form that you can put onto your blog. There are various email notification programmes, the most notable of which are Feedblitz and Feedburner and they offer free services as well as premium services (which have greater user flexibility). Your visitor can enter their email address into the form to receive an update in their Inbox whenever you update your blog. Feedburner also offers other useful tools for blog owners that can help publicise their blog, using the blog feed eg you can incorporate rolling headlines from your blog onto an email or onto other sites you own.

The feed can also be activated in various other ways to give the blog owner information about how many other blogs/ websites are linking to your blog. The more other blogs link to your blog, the greater your blog is deemed to be an authority. The principle grew out of the way that academics identify who among them is a great authority on a subject, reflecting the academic roots of the people who created the internet. The more an academic paper is cited by other academics, the greater it - and its writer - is held in esteem. A key site that helps bloggers identify who is linking to their blog and how many links they have is Technorati. As a blog owner, you should go to Technorati and “claim” your feed there.

Pic: thanks to joenickp.com