What is the FeedSweep Cloud?

Understanding cloud computing.

Cloud computing is quite the buzzword today. Everyone has jumped on the band wagon and is trying to get into the act. The problem: Most of the hype is created by marketing departments and not the users of cloud computing services. The result is that the whole concept has become rather murky.

What cloud computing is NOT!

The concept of Cloud computing has developed its own set of vagarities and misdirections:

Cloud computer is NOT a specific architecture or infrastructure.
The Internet and the Web are NOT the same as the Cloud.
Cloud computing is NOT new.
All remote computing is NOT cloud computing.
One vendor will NOT control cloud computing.

So what is cloud computing?

According to Gartner cloud computing it is "a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided 'as a service' across the Internet to multiple external customers."

In English, that definition means the cloud should just deliver a service - usually on a subscription basis - to allow access from anywhere. The service would be cheaper because of the scale of economy and there would be a big incentive for services to be cross vendor and feature shared resources.

Cloud computing is just another way of getting your same old computing tasks done.

What is the FeedSweep Cloud?

In general, the FeedSweep Cloud allows you to take some of the strain off your servers, web pages and blogs for serving fresh, new content. Specifically, the FeedSweep Cloud is a service running over the Internet that reads and updates feeds, formats the feed content into HTML according to the parameters you specific and plops this code onto your web page or blog.

You can tell FeedSweep to read an RSS, ATOM or RDF feed, or any combination of these protocols, strip out the content and sort according to a freshness factor, wrap the content in the formatting of your choice (fonts, colors, borders etc.) before adding to your web page or blog.

Why would I want to use the FeedSweep Cloud?

FeedSweep does the "heavy lifting" of getting new feed content to you. You set up your web pages or blog with a FeedSweep widget and never have to worry about getting new updates or learning how to program RSS or ATOM or RDF feeds. To properly handle this types of feeds is a complicated business and we have done all this for you - and made it very simple to implement.