Web In Depth

RSS has become a very widely used buzz word in web 2.0 era. But what most of us don’t realize is that beneath this seemingly simple term lies a whole set of concepts and technologies. These days RSS means a lot more than what it initially meant. To truly understand the entire landscape of RSS we need to start with the idea of a web feed.

What is a Web Feed?

Most of the new web 2.0 web sites (led by blogs) update there content regularly (generally daily but some within few minutes). It is important that this updated information is received by the readers of the blog. Now the traditional method of viewing web content has been visiting the site in a web browser. This is perfectly okay for static web 1.0 site which didn’t change for long periods and you only revisit the site when you want to remind yourself of old information you have forgotten. But with regular updates it became nearly impossible to keep visiting the same site throughout the day to keep up. Another factor that makes staying with the latest information difficult is the shear volume of web sites in the form of blogs (when writing this blog count in Technorati is 70 million).

We can generally identify factors required to make this process simplified.

1. We need some method that keeps up with the updates and allow us to keep track of them when we want.( notice that some blogs move content a day old to archives in which case finding all the post within the few days which you haven’t read can be very tiresome)
2. We need some method to keep track of each and every site we are interested in one place without visiting each one separately.
3. Another requirement not universally adhered is that this service should provide short extracts so the reader can decide looking at the topic and first few words if he is willing to read that article or like to skip it. This helps to manage the information overload.

Enter the web feed. The best way to describe it to a web user is to say that it with “feed reader” gave us the ability to achieve the above three criteria, thus allowing many people like myself to track multitude of blogs and sites in a very easy efficient manner.

To give a more technical definition we can think of it as a document that has the necessary data with relevant links that are machine readable.

This document is not for humans as mentioned above it can be read by special software that is called “feed reader”. These convert the information into html web pages and display the content in one window. In users point of view the most important thing about this is that it allows you to sort out exactly what you want to display in what order.

Remember that the third requirement I mentioned about, short summaries and how it’s not universal. Well the control of what to display and what not to display is entirely under the control of web masters (not really! I’ll show you why?) So giving readers summaries with links or the entire post is their decision. Why is it there decision? Why can’t I decide? Well let me enlighten you, the web feed is a document written with XML and it is an integral part of the web site itself and the web master can adjust the code(assuming he know XML which is quite easy) which specify what to display as he wish. A more social reason is that what they publish in their site is their property and they have the intellectual rights over the content thus they have the right to decide how much of it they release to others to use. Publishing a feed is essentially a granting of right to use the given information in some other site. The important to remember is that the copyright of the material is with the webmaster and he can enforce it at any time. But usually if you use it with mentioning of the publishing site with a link to the original article things are pretty okay.

So what can we make available through feeds? Is it only text. No, it can be almost any information, ranging from plain text to pictures, audio and even video. One of the great success stories of web feeds was the effect it had in popularizing the podcast. For the time being think of podcast as a multimedia file(originally audio) that can be send through RSS feed and is automatically downloaded by appropriate software that can read the feed.(I will explain podcasting in a later post)

What is syndication?

This word is mostly related with the newspaper industry where certain institutions make available to the other publishes news items and other articles for which they own the copyright. The others can publish these articles in there own publications as long as the copyright terms are met. The most famous of these examples is comic strip syndication were you see popular comics appear in many different newspapers.

So why is it important for us?

Because web feeds paved the way for web syndication.Which basically means that all or some part of the content in a web site is released by the author so others can use it with proper acknowledgment. How do they make this available? Well no surprises there; through web feeds.

What are the benefits of doing this for the provider?

Well his content will be published by many other sites that will have a link pointing to the complete article. As these sites are read by millions of people, this is effectively free traffic. And traffic is something that web masters would do anything to get, after all what the use of all your content without any readers.

What are the benefits to the users of these syndications?

Well anybody running a blog on some topic wants his blog to be up-to-date and in depth on the topic. The easiest way to make that happen is to make use of the syndicated feeds. This allows the blogger to concentrate on some unique articles while providing better value to the readers.

I believe this introduction allowed you to understand what web feeds are and how it relates to syndication. To summaries web feed is a document that has the ability to make available summaries of new content, while that process of making content available is syndication. In reality there is not much difference in these two and web feeds are universally called “Syndication Feeds”

So go and join my RSS feed to keep up with the series on RSS (more coming up) and other great stuff. If you do not know how, keep visiting as I explain the nitty gritty of subscribing to RSS.