Web feed
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A web feed is an XML-based document which contains a sequence of content items, usually a short informational story or post, possibly with a link to a more extensive story on a web site. Web logs and news website are common sources for web feeds.
The term syndication is used to describe the availability of a web feed for an information source, such as a blog. This is also known as publishing a feed. Once a feed is published users (or code) must then subscribe to the feed in order to receive the content. This is done via software programs that can read web feeds.
The term aggregation is used to describe the process of combining the contents of multiple web feeds for display on a single web page, or it describes a personal collection of feeds in an online or offline subscription reader. This is also known as subscribing to a web feed. Most famous online reader is my.yahoo.com.
Web feeds are designed to be machine readable, so there is no requirement that they be destined only for human readers. For example, business partners could use web feeds to exchange information without any human intervention.
Web feeds are commonly in RSS or Atom "feed" format. They may also be in RDF format.