Web syndication

From ArticleWorld

Web syndication was used until a few years ago a facility offered by a site to the news and blogging community by which access to web content was provided. Nowadays though the accent is mostly put on providing web feeds with a much wider area of content.

Description

Most of the web feeds use the XML, the more recently developed RSS which made up a lot for the previous’ defects and Atom which tends to develop the technology further still, but anything could be used really including HTML or even text documents. The most common used format used for web syndication is RSS, although it is rather controversial due to the incompatibilities between its three versions (0.9, 1.0 and 2.0). They were all thought as independent formats which lead to many confusions because all three of them are widely used. The new player in the market is Atom which tries hard to cover the defects of its ancestors with some degree of success. The web feeds themselves have known an explosion through the internet, mainly because they allow the replacement of newsletters which were privacy sensitive issue for the common user, also they are used as marketing tools, a well thought and informative feed can bring a lot of traffic. The web feeds have become in fact one of the most effective tools in developing organic links for a site.