Content Syndication vs RSS Feeds
Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 11:59 am by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer
While both Content Syndication and RSS feeds allow users to access content more easily, they have two very different purposes.
Content Syndication is basically a “push” of content. If you are a writer (or a blogger) you might want to share your writing among multiple web sites. In order to do this, you will need to make sure it is put into a format that is easy for other websites to import directly into their sites, while making sure the reader knows where it is coming from.
You will need to make your content available in either an RSS format, such as Atom, in order to “push” your content out to the RSS readers. When you have this set up, your syndicated content is usually indicated with text links or graphic buttons that show the words RSS, Atom, XML, Syndicate, and/or Subscribe.
An easy way to get your content syndicated is to use the IdeaMarketers ezine directory. For a small fee, they will offer your content as an RSS feed to other webmasters who are interested in your subject matter.
Blog programs, such as WordPress, set up the RSS portion automatically. If you scroll down in this blog to where it says - Syndication RSS 2.0 - and hover over the text, you will see the RSS “link” of ‘http://blog.affiliateclassroom.com/feed/.
This brings us to the “pull” portion, the RSS Feed. If a webmaster wanted to feature this feed on their site, they would use this RSS code to do so. However, they would need to use an aggregator or feed generator to make the content useable.
If you have a My Yahoo page (at my.yahoo.com), they make it easy. Just put this code into the space they have made for it, and process it. They have the aggregator, and you will now have access to all future blog posts from your My Yahoo page. You are basically “pulling” the information to your My Yahoo for easy access to the latest updates.
If you are still confused, play around with it a little. Go to ideamarketers.com and see how they syndicate their content. Then sign up for a Yahoo! account at my.yahoo.com; find their RSS Feed area and import a few feeds.
Once you have seen it in action, it really is quite simple (which is why it’s called RSS – Really Simple Syndication.)
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