Content Syndication
Content syndication is becoming widely used by many people. Though not everybody uses it, a lot do.
Content Syndication is used by people that use or create a website. A major purpose for creating the website is to get their information out where people will see and read it. They want to attract people to their website by providing what the people are looking for.
Content Syndication helps them to do this. What they do is this: when someone creates a new website they will leave a portion of that website blank. This blank portion is for other web sites to use.
One way that the other web sites use it is if it has been licensed to them. They can put links to their web sites on it that are automatically updated so that people are always getting recent information.
Then they don't have to go and look up what they want to know. It is always right there. If they're interested, they can go to the site.
The most common way that web sites use content syndication is through web feeds. Web feed programs are kind of like email, only you don't have to give out your email address.
If there is a web feed on a site you happen to be looking at, and you want that web feed to come to you, you can get it to come to your feed reader.
Your feed reader is a page where you can have many feeds coming to you. The feeds are just updates from the sites you are interested in. It is also called a news reader or commonly an aggregator.
On your feed reader, news reader or aggregator (whatever you want to call it) you could have a weather feed, a news feed, any feed that you like. The feeds are automatically updated so that you are always receiving the most recent information from that site.
Some people wonder why people would want to have web feeds. It's just putting your information out at wide and then people don't come to your site to get it. They think it is just directing them away from your site.
But this seems not to be the case. Web feeding can help both the people feeding their information and the people that are displaying the feeds on their site.
It helps the "feeders" because if their information is good, it can draw people to their site. People that otherwise would have been too lazy to look them up.
True it spreads them all over, but the more sites they are feeding to, the more people will see their feed. It is an easy and cheap way to advertise.
It helps the people displaying the feed because they have free information on their site. It is stuff that they didn't have to write, but it still attracts people to their pages because there is more information than you can find on a normal website.
People who are searching the web for information might go nuts looking through ten different web sites trying to find what they need. They want one page that has it all. Even though that is usually not the case.
But with content syndication, it can be the case in a way. They can have a lot of information on one page. Not only do they have the original information of that site, but also links to other sites that have what they are looking for.
Content syndication is not used everywhere but it is becoming more widely used because people are seeing how useful it is. It helps the people feeding the information, the people displaying the information and the people reading the information.
