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You may also be interested in Vistua's own site feeds, for a practical introduction to using a reader see "Syndication How To"

Standard Feed Icon

Web Feed is a generic term used to refer to various kinds of very similar technology for syndication of site content. The most popular of these technologies is RSS, "RDF Site Summary". The "Atom" format is also occasionally used.

Feeds contain summary information about sites, such as text from new articles on the sites which is downloaded by a feed reader and rendered into a human readable format.

This in itself would not be terribly useful, however the key to web feed syndication lies in aggregation, (which is why feed readers are occasionally referred to as "aggregators") the compilation of these feeds into a single, (usually) chronological source.

This is similar to how local newspapers work. Because these small papers cannot afford to maintain dozens of foreign bureaux to cover global affairs—or may lack specialized journalistic expertise needed to cover topics such as the arts and sciences, they have two options, entirely omit coverage of these topics or use syndicated "wire copy".

Similarly, feed readers accumulate content, which may include news articles, blog posts, comics and the like from a list of web feeds and present it to the viewer for consumption.

Simple illustration of syndication

The presence of the standard feed icon shown indicates the availability of a feed in most browsers.

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