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.

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.