So what are Feeds, RSS, Atom, Feed Readers?

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So what are Feeds, RSS, Atom, Feed Readers?

By Pankaj November 24, 2006 filed in Blogging Tips

This is one question I have been asked many times in the past from various people I know.

Lets understand the problem first. I as Internet user, read lot of information published or updated on various websites and weblogs (commonly known as blogs). As a simple example, a news site like CNN publish news everyday and there are so many blogs I am interested in reading which are updated regularly. Now if I have to read the fresh content on a daily basis i would need to personally visit each site/blog (say around 15/20) and check if there is fresh content in these forums and then read them, whew! it would become a virtually impossible task for me . This is where feeds comes in handy and solves my problem.

So what are feeds anyway? Web Feed, more commonly known as feed, is the data format used for serving the regularly updated contents such as news, forums, blogs to Internet users like me (us). These provider or distributor of these types of contents syndicated a web feed which users can subscribe to. Sounds complicated? OK, I will try to put it in suppsedly in a more simple manner :). There are websites who wants to publish / distribute their contents (news sites, forums, blogs). In order to do so, these websites syndicate a web feed that produce contents in a standard data format. Now People who wants to read or receive these contents, subscribe to these web feed. Much simpler.

How do the users receive the actual contents from a web feed anyway? There are software programs called feed readers or aggregator which does this job for you. Using these programs, you can subscribe to a web feed (by entering the URL) provided by the content distributor. These programs checks for the new contents when you get connected on these website and downloads for you if anything new is available. This is easy since you can subscribe to as many feeds as you want, get connected and download all the fresh/updated content. This way you can read all the updated content from one program (your feed reader) and you save your time by not visiting to individual website / blogs. Problem solved.

The feed readers are available as a client application (a program installed on your PC/Laptop) for various platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, Pocket PC, Mobile Phones) or Web based services built in portals like Google, Yahoo. For a more a less complete list, please refer to RSS Compendium - RSS Readers

What happened to RSS and Atom? Well, RSS and Atom are two standard data format for providing web feeds to its users. The acronym RSS is a term for a format that means different depending the various available versions as mentioned below …
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
- RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) (RDF - Resource description Framework)

As far as Atom is concerned, it is product of dissatisfaction in existing RSS data format. Atom is an attempt to solve many incompatibilities and widely adopted versions of RSS and to ease the difficulties of developers developing web application with web syndication feeds.

Anyway, most of the content distributors provide feeds in both the format but some of them in only one.

Resources
- To know the history of feed formats, refer to RSS (file format)
- For a detail comparison between RSS and Atom, refer to Atom (standard).