Blog Syndication

by Krista on June 17, 2004 in Blogging

Many companies use some form of email newsletters to communicate with their clients and prospects. Some use blogs. And then there’s syndication through RSS or Blogger.com’s Atom technology.

RSS and Atom are XML based documents that can be read in newsreaders. You can take a look at the site feed for this blog here. You’ll notice it looks like a lot of code and is barely readable. However, if you open the feed in a newsreader like NewsGator (or a number of others – see the AtomEnabled.org directory) or online news feeder like Bloglines.com (which I use, and it’s free!), it will show up in a readable format.

You might be asking why you should care about this. Well, syndication offers numerous benefits to anyone who regularly publishes content. It allows anyone who’s interested to automatically opt in to download your site’s content through their newsreader – and they don’t have to go to your website or wait for your email update to read your content. This keeps your content fresh and in front of them – and with none of the bad stuff that comes with email like spam!

If you don’t publish frequently, you still might enjoy one of these newsreaders. Most news and blog sites have feeds, so if you read different sources each day, you can now download all content into one place! NewsGator works either as a subscribtion based online service or through Microsoft Outlook. You simply subscribe to the feeds you want and it checks them throughout the day, downloading content for you. You can set up Outlook folders for each feed, or lump them all together.

MarketingSherpa had a great article recently on RSS 101 and how one day soon, it may reach mass appeal.

Written by: Krista

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