Syndication is the process of automatically receiving a Web feed (RSS or Atom) from a Web site. With syndication you don’t have to because the content comes to you. After a while you would probably be tired of visiting that many Web sites each day. Imagine you enjoy reading the content on 20 different Web sites, and visit all 20 each day to read any updates. This automated process is known as syndication. This provides an automated method for the subscribers to read the new content from many different Web sites without actually visiting each one. When content on a Web site is updated, the publishers send out the feeds with the updated content in sequential order to their subscribers. Many blogs and other Web sites have the ability to publish both RSS and Atom feeds. The Atom feed has gone through two versions: 0.3 in December 2003 and 1.0 in December 2005. This type of feed was developed because of the many incompatible versions of RSS feeds. Similar to RSS feeds, Atom feeds are also specified in XML. The second popular type of Web feed is the Atom feed. This has led to some incompatibilities and issues between the various versions, which I won’t go into detail here. The first version of RSS was first used in March 1999 on the My Netscape portal and has since been modified by various people and corporations. The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) (RSS 2.0) feed started out first as Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91), which then became RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90). This post will describe the two feed types and how someone can use them. There are, however, two main types of feeds that can be used to send the sequentially and updated content from a Web site. They provide a means to distribute the contents of a Web site to subscribers. A Web feed is used extensively on the Web especially for those who own a blog.

Web feeds