As mentioned earlier, some newspaper publishers have reported 300+% increases in daily online readership since offering web feeds to their website visitors. However, they are not the only regular users of web feeds.

In fact, possibly the most common publishers of web feeds are bloggers, but not necessarily on purposes. (See our intro to blogging, if you are unfamiliar with blogs.) All of the popular blogging platforms automatically generate a web feed. Many bloggers do not even know this, or at least, do not understand how to take advantage of this.

Each blog entry that is posted gets automatically added to the blog's web feed. Subscribers to the blog can add the feed's URL to their feed aggregators (readers) and view entry headlines. Savvy subscribers use this as a method to consume multiple blogs on a daily basis. It is an easy way to check whether or not their favourite bloggers have posted new entries on a particular day, since bloggers do not always update their blogs daily.

The benefits of using web feeds, to both publishers and subscribers, is worth the promotion efforts. As web feeds are still a young technology compared to the Internet, a lot of promotional effort is necessary.

The web feed promotional tools are just starting to appear, with litle orange "XML" graphic buttons (rectangles) being the most common. Newer tools include FeedBurner's BuzzBoost and Headline Animator services, which are used in tandem with web feed, but usually with blogs.

You can see these tools in action on this website. In fact, in the right-hand column of this page, you will see a number of large blue-grey rectangles that have "Powered by Feedburner" at the bottom. Every few seconds, each of them will change their headline. The idea is that if the titles are enticing enough, visitors to your website will click on the graphic to visit (in this case) the blog.

Also, on the homepage of this website, if you scroll down far enough, you will see excerpts of several blogs' web feeds. The idea again is that the excerpts are hopefully interesting enough to entice visitors to click on a blog's item's link.

Once the visitor visits the blog (or website), they should be able to see either a text or graphic link suggesting that they "subscribe to this feed", or something similar. The problem is that not all publishers are making it clear what this means. Surveys show that the vast majority of Internet users either don't know what RSS/ Atom/ web feeds are, or at least don't know they are using them.

The promotion of the benefits of web feeds will take a great deal of effort, but will be worth it for both publishers and subscribers. Please watch this space for links to an expanded "Web Feeds Resource Guide" for more on web feeds, how to publish them, how to subscribe to and view them, available software, available promotional tools, etc. For those with some understanding of Web Feeds, particularly the RSS format, we encourage you to visit both the RSS Diary and RSS Cases blogs.