Blogs and newsfeeds - the world is your audience
Thanks to newsfeeds, you can make your blog's posts available for people to read through Technorati, Digg, del.icio.us, and all the other social bookmarking sites or aggregators. Basically, you first need to register on the aggregator site, then configure your weblog to ping the social bookmarking site. After that, each time you post on your blog, it will ping Technorati, Digg, DZone, and so on, and the aggregator will pick up the latest content from your blog by means of your RSS feed.
The following diagram shows the full process with Technorati:
This is basically the same process for all social bookmarking sites and aggregators. So, as you can see, the URL feed (or newsfeed) of your blog helps you to promote your blog on the blogosphere!
What is a newsfeed
In short, a newsfeed (or feed) is a summary of the latest posts and comments of your blog in XML. The two formats used by Roller, and by almost every other weblog application and aggregator, are RSS and Atom. The following table shows these two formats—a brief description and an URL example of each one.
|
Feed Format |
Definition |
Example URL used by Roller |
|---|---|---|
|
RSS |
A collection of several related feed formats used to publish information (blog entries, audio, video, podcasts) in a standard format. The most recent standard is RSS 2.0. | |
|
Atom |
The Atom Syndication Format is a newer standard for newsfeeds, intended to replace RSS. |
At the time of this writing, both formats are widely used. Atom can be considered as the future of newsfeeds, but only time will prove it. In the meantime, we can use both of them.
How can a newsfeed help to promote your blog
When you subscribe to Technorati and Digg, every time you publish a post, your blog sends a ping, telling Technorati and Digg to check your most recent posts and to include them in their lists by means of an RSS or Atom feed. Then, visitors from Technorati and Digg go to your blog and, if they find it interesting, can subscribe to your RSS or Atom feeds. The following exercise will show you the process of subscribing to a newsfeed.
