Research into Current Feed Practice on Popular Sites and Platforms

Publishing Formats

The following table shows which feed formats are used on several different publishing platforms. Other than the base syndication format, the remaining columns are focused on the publication of media content such as videos, photos and audio.

This list is broken into sets based on the primary media published by each platform. The first section lists general weblog/microblog platforms. The second section lists photo/image publishing platforms. The third section lists video publishing platforms, the fourth section lists a single audio publishing platform while the fifth and final section lists activity aggregators whose feeds describe user actions rather than published content.

Some platforms actually support other formats but do not link to them on the page either by an in-page hyperlink nor by auto-discovery. Such feeds are not included in this table since unlinked feeds are not useful to most users.

Media Publishing in Detail

The general list above acknowledges any use of Enclosures and MediaRSS elements by a platform. However, the level of detail published by each service and the exect mechanisms used varies from platform-to-platform.

The following is not a comprehensive list of all of the above platforms, but rather a selection that demonstrates various approaches.

RSS Enclosures

RSS Enclosures are used for different things by different platforms as shown in the following table.

The media:content Element

The media:player Element

The media:thumbnail Element