Ajax software     Free javascripts 
↑


Main Page

Web Feeds and

Social Bookmarking

You’ve just added some great new content to your web site.

Now what

? Of course, your current visi-

tors will appreciate the content. They may even tell a few friends about it. But there are technologies

that you can leverage to facilitate and encourage them to do some free marketing for you.

This chapter explores web feeds and social bookmarking, two technologies that web site visitors

can use to access and promote content that they enjoy. Encouraging visitors to do so is a vital part

of viral marketing. This chapter discusses various ways to accomplish this, and walks you through

three exercises where you:

?

Create your own RSS feeds.

?

Syndicate RSS and Atom feeds.

?

Add social bookmarking icons to your pages and feeds.

Web Feeds

The

web feed

is a mechanism used to distribute content over the web, in XML-based formats, with-

out attaching any visual presentation to it. The typical way for a person to read your content is to

visit your web pages, retrieving their content laid out in HTML format. This doesn’t work with

web feeds, because they contain no presentation. Instead, people use specialized programs that

retrieve and display the data.

Web feeds are used to disseminate information automatically — to humans as well as other web

sites. They are a very effective vehicle for information distribution, and they’ve become very pop-

ular because they make it easy for somebody to read news, or recent blog posts, from his or her

favorite sources. Web feeds are also nicely described at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Web_feed

.

c07.qxd:c07 10:42 151

Ajax software     Free javascripts 
→