Data feed is one of those terms that people throw around but half of us don’t really know what it means.
Every online merchant is supposed to have one, everybody wants you to send it to them, some people tell you, that you already have one you can utilize better, and other people want to create one for you for a low, low price. And here you are, reading this post and saying “What the @#$%& is a data feed?”
OK, well let’s play Lazy Blogger for a second and go to Wikipedia, or as I call it, “The crappy encyclopedia that I don’t have to get up from the couch to use” Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about data feed:
Data feed is a mechanism for data users to receive updated data from data sources.
There you go folks! End of post. Thanks for reading and please, tip your waitress!
Just kidding. But, see even the all-powerful wikipedia has trouble with this, so you shouldn’t feel bad. When you have a data feed, what you have is information that is so well organized that someone who wants to can pick out the information they need, get it all and not miss anything.
Take your website. Your website may be divided into categories and have good navigation and fancy menus and may seem organized but it is not a data feed, it may use them but it isn’t one. The reason it isn’t is because you can’t go to any random page on your site and ask a random question about your products and pull out the answer. You can’t go to your Umbrella category for example and use it to show you every item on your entire website that is colored orange. You can’t go to your About Us page, and return all your designer jeans.
However if you opened up an Excel spreadsheet, typed in all your product names into one column, your prices in the next, the SKU# in the next, color in the next, and on and on until you had fully described your inventory, that would be a data feed! How can I tell the difference between data feed and not a data feed?
Data Feed
Not a Data Feed
It’s simple if I had a data feed, there would be structure. In fact when we are talking data feeds we are really talking structured data feeds. The structure allows us to know where certain information is, even if we don’t know exactly what the information is. So if you give me your bee-yoo-tiful web site, I can’t find everything on it that is orange and be confident that I found all the orange stuff, because I might have missed a page, or I may not be able to find the part of the description that tells you what color something is.
But if you hand me your spreadsheet, and you say. “Hey, Smelly! How many orange items do I have?” (why are you so mean, anyway?) As long as you have a column called “color” and I can read, I can find all your orange items. In Excel or OpenOffice, under the ‘Data’ Menu, choose Sort, yep, I’m a geek.
Who cares anyway?
Well, see data feeds solve lots of problems. If I’m a shopping search engine that wants to collect as many stores’ inventories as possible, I don’t want to have to go to every web site and copy down all the info, like in the example above, I might miss some stuff. However, if the site owner, sends me a handy feed, I can plop it right in the mix with other stores data. And since all the info is structured, I can easily pull out all the orange items, when somebody comes to my search engine and types “orange”
If I want to sell other people’s products for them and collect a commission (an affiliate program is what we call this on the web), well I wouldn’t get very far, if I had to start out by copying all the info off the site and building my own web pages. But, if I had a shopping cart program like OSCommerce or an affiliate script and I had a data feed. I can click a few buttons and BAM! I got products and you’ve got sales!
Now that you understand data feeds, we’ll set about making one and using one in another thrilling episode!
