The Web Feed

In my third I am going to write about what the web feed is and this media components influence in the field.

Web feed is around since about 1999 and its task is to collect the information from websites we choose (subscribe) and deliver it to us without actually having to browse them. It is completely free and orders every piece of information in chronological order. We can access our web feed through a web feed reader that automatically does everything for us. It can deliver us a broad variety of content such as: news updates, blog posts, weather, and a lot more. Collecting a huge amount of key information is also called feed aggregation and it enables the viewer to go through only needed information in a brief period of time. The time reduction is due to the lack of searching and clicking around trying to find what we are looking for.

One of the most common used web feed format is RSS (Rich Site Summary). An RSS document includes not only the text or whatever we are interested in, but it also contains metadata such as publishing date, authorship etc. RSS feed is a structure that organizes content uploaded on a regular basis. The variety of what can be collected through RSS created a radio like media.

Another honorable mention is Facebook’s news feed. It is a feature that did not exist before 2006. If a user wanted to see something new on someone else’s profile, then they had to visit that profile. In 2006 Facebook released their new home page the news feed, that collected every information and changes on a user’s friends’ profile and listed it there. In 2009 the option the like a page was added to the social media platform so users can collect information on the feed they need and enabled further customization.

As Facebook is a very influential platform with two billion people using it every month its content does shape people’s thinking and it has been used to do so. In this aspect news feed is very different from web feed because we do have some options to customize it but we can not fully eliminate not wanted content.

So, to sum things up web feed is our personal space of the world wide web where our interests are collected and nothing more.

Thank you for reading, best wishes,

Balint Adam

2/24/2021

Sources:

https://www.youneedfeeds.com/what-is-a-web-feed

https://jschafer1963.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/what-is-rss-and-why-is-it-significant-to-web-2-0/

https://perishablepress.com/an-easy-introduction-to-web-feeds/