Syndication and Feed

The next stop beyond blogging is Syndication. This is a way to get content from one website automatically up on another website. You don't need to be a blogger to use syndication. I've been using it rather painlessly on My Yahoo for awhile to keep up with a few favorite websites. They aren't all blogs, many newspapers use syndicated feeds to provide their headlines.

There seem to be two main rivals, RSS and Atom. I've been exposed more to RSS, so I'll defer commenting on Atom for awhile. My Yahoo is an example of RSS. They have a very long and detailed FAQ. You must log into Yahoo to read the headlines.

I discovered Bloglines late last night. I haven't quite figured out what it does, yet, whether it actually hosts blogs itself, or if it is simply a service for hooking you up with the blogs you are interested in. The most popular feeds on Bloglines are things I don't normally think of as blogs.

Feedster is another RSS service that I have heard of, but don't know anything about. But, they have a corporate overview page, so they must not be in it just for a hobby.

Then there is FeedBurner with its informative FeedBurner - About Feed Syndication.

The exciting one for me is Apple's upcoming Apple - Mac OS X - Tiger Preview - Safari. It "knows" all standards such as RSS and Atom, and should be able to access any feed on the web if not the entire internet.

Mozilla already has feed capability on Firefox, but so far I'm not thrilled with the way it works. I've been using feeds on My Yahoo for quite a while now. I suspect I'll come to love one of these newer (to me) services better, but right now, I'm still playing around and learning.