Web Syndication

Common Web feed icon

    First of all, what is Syndication? Basically syndication is the supply of material for reuse and integration with other material, often through a paid service subscription. The best example of web syndication is Newspaper. News agencies distribute contents to newspapers, they reformat it and integrate it with other copies and publish it.

    Web syndication refers to the websites providing information and the websites displaying it. ie, A section of a website is made available for other websites to use. For the providing sites, it is an exposure across numerous online platform. For the receiving sites, it is an effective way of adding depths to their sites and making it more attractive. Online content syndication is a rapid growing industrial sector in both hardware and software field. In the early days, syndication was a heavy manual process. Then an agreement reached favouring both supplier and customers reached. According to the agreement the customers would simply copy the desired content from the supplier's Web site and paste it into their own. Thus it became an easy process.

    In order to implement this new communication process, a series of XML files are defined. There is no standard format for Web syndication. To use this technology, site owners create or obtain specialized software (such as a content management system) which, in the machine-readable XML format, presents new articles in a list, giving a line or two of each article and a link to the full article or post. Web logs and news websites are common sources for web feeds, but feeds are also used to deliver structured information ranging from weather data to "top ten" lists of hit tunes. The term syndication is used to describe making available a feed for an information source. Like syndicated print newspaper features or broadcast programs, webfeed contents may be shared and republished by other web sites.