Summersault Blog

If you already know about the world of website content syndication, RSS news feeds, feed reader/aggregator software, and all that jazz, you might wonder why I’m bothering to post Yet Another Article about it. I’ll just go ahead and say that I have purely evangelistic motives: I would love to see content syndication adopted more widely, both by end users, and by website content producers. So if this is old hat, you’re welcome to move along, not much to see here. If you’re wondering what website content syndication is and how it might make your life better, read on!

In earlier days of the web, when you found a site that you liked and that you thought you might want to return to, you “bookmarked” it, putting it in your list of places to visit. Bookmarking got more and more powerful as web browser software makers built in various organizational tools to keep those lists straight and to let you know when you might want to visit those site again, if the links went dead, etc.

Then along came Google, which spoiled many users to the point where bookmarking was no longer time efficient, because they could just as easily look up the most accurate location for the site by typing in a few keywords, even if those words were only loosely associated with the place they were trying to get to. I know that I largely stopped using bookmarks for all but the most critical and most oft-visited destinations. But this also meant I lost touch with a lot of sites and good content that I might otherwise have visited more often. Google good, Google bad.

Then the whole “blogging” phenomenon came along which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, really wasn’t a new concept, just a refined way of doing it that worked particularly well. But this has shaped a lot of web content production into a particular paradigm related to the organization of postings, with a headline, content, category, archives, comments, trackbacks, and so on. Everyone from your next-door neighbor to major journalistic organizations are using blog-style content management systems to display and organize their content.

This kind of homogenization has led to the groundwork for web content syndication. What is it? Well, perhaps the most useful definition by way of analogy would be to think of major news wire services like the Associated Press and Reuters. When they compile a list of their news stories for newspapers to use, they just don’t write that list down in a text editor, print out a bunch of copies, and set them on the street outside their doorstep for editors to pick up. There is a standard format they use to produce a news wire containing all those stories, and then the newspapers have a standard set of tools they can use to read and manage the stories as they come in.

Until the advent of content syndication, it would have been unimaginable to think that I could have easy access to all of the content (”news stories”) - on all of the websites (”news sources”) that I cared about with some standard tool, instead of having to visit each site, scroll down the page, click around the navigation, and then move on to the next site. Not to mention keeping track of when I’d last read which story, visited which site, etc. But content syndication changes all that - it gives you one-click access to the latest additions to the sites you care about (or, at least the ones that have adopted news syndication in some form, which is a lot of them).

So how does this work? Well, at a basic level, when the maintainer of a site adds some new content to their site, they also (often through an automated process) update a news feed file with the basic information about that new content. (You may have seen the little orange block graphics that say “XML” or “RSS” or “syndicate” or “Feed”, or perhaps even just a link that says “syndicate this site” - those are all indicators that the site has a feed.) Users interested in the content on that site can point their news aggregator software to that news feed file, and then their software will let them know when new content is available.

For me, this means that I don’t have to visit (as of this writing) 46 websites when I want to see what’s new with them, I just wait for my news aggregation/reading software to tell me when there’s something to go see. In a lot of cases, you can even read the content from within that software, so you’re not even opening up the website itself. It saves me a lot of time, simplifies my web browsing experience, and allows me to keep up with a wide variety of content sources - everything from personal weblogs to the local newspaper to what my Congressional representatives did today to the latest MP3 file of my favorite public radio programs. You can even use feeds to track mailing lists that would otherwise be clogging your e-mail inbox. Wow.

So, how can you get started with content syndication? First you need to pick a news reading program. If you’re on a Mac, I recommend NetNewsWire (or NetNewsWire Lite, which is free), and now even the Safari web browser has a read built in. If you’re on Linux, try Straw for Gnome (I haven’t used it myself, let me know if there’s something better). If you’re on Windows, it looks like SharpReader and FeedReader (which integrates with Outlook) are recommended, with plenty of other options. If you don’t have a dedicated computer you use, you might consider using the web-based Bloglines, which will manage your feeds via a web-page that you can access from wherever you are.

Once you have your software set up, all you have to do is point it to the “feeds” for the sites you want to track. The instructions for doing this will vary, but usually you can just put in the address of the site, and the feed reader software will figure it out from there.

And you’re done. Feed reading bliss, content at your fingertips. Let me know how it works for you! (And don’t forget to subscribe to the Summersault Weblog: RSS feed link here.)

If you own or maintain a website, I also hope it’s clear how content syndication can help you too. Your users can stay informed of updates, and you can engage your target audience more fully by making it easier to bring them back to the site. Think of it as a customer newsletter sent out every time you make an update, with no effort on your part. It’s a service you can provide with very little effort, and pretty soon it may even be a service people will expect. So, tell your webmaster to get that feed file up and running - it could change the way people use your site!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 8:53 am and is filed under Desktop Software, Website Design, Internet / Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.