Web Syndication
Web syndication is a practice where a particular section of a website is made accessible for alien sites to use. One recognized way of doing this is by straightaway licensing the content so that other programmers can use it. In general practice though, web syndication refers more to allowing web feeds to be available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website’s most freshly modified content. For instance, many sites have the latest news or forum posts. A web feed is the most usual kind of web syndication.
Web syndication, at a large scale at least, started in early 2001. Miniclip (a company that is known for online browser based games) freely syndicated online browser based interactive games to the masses, kick starting the web syndication era. This has transitioned into a stage today, where many different types and varieties of content are syndicated over the Internet. A vast majority of all online publishers (including major newspapers, commercial web sites and blogs) now put out their newest news headlines, product offers or blog postings in typical format of news feed.
Syndication is beneficial to both, the website providing the information and even the website displaying it. This is because, for the receiving site, content syndication is an effective way of adding far greater depth and propinquity of data to its pages, making it more striking to users. On the other front, for the broadcasting site, syndication implies publicity across multiple online stages. This generates new traffic for the transmitting site and adds to the existing traffic for the receiving site.
Owing to the increasing wariness of web surfers towards providing personal information for marketing materials, the pervasiveness of web syndication comes to the forefront to online marketers as well.
Although the format could be anything transported over HTTP, such as HTML or JavaScript, it is more commonly XML. The two main families of web syndication formats are RSS and Atom.
Filed under: RSS
