a memo
Hey, wanna see something neat? Dynamic headlines from another site!
W00t! Syndication is fun!
Content syndication, which is a fancy term for the ability of a computer to learn about and display the contents of a website on another computer, has been around since the early days of My Netscape.
But the convergence of Smart Mobs and a new generation of dynamic publishing tools is opening up exciting new possibilities for syndication. Yes, I sound like a marketdroid. But when it's just as easy to render your late-night ramblings in XML as it is to render them in HTML, and just as easy for some other machine to pick them up and summarize them on another site, then we have to start using terms like "publishing revolution" again. Self-published kicks ass. Self-syndicated is a whole new layer of cool.
For you Live Journal users out there, your Friends page is a syndication venue: LJ handles all the details, but you are reading the newsfeeds off of your friends' journals. Every Live Journal, and many Blogger blogs, have a built-in RSS newsfeed.
There has been an explosion in the number of newsfeeds, but still relatively few tools for actually making them useful. You can run a standalone newsreader to display syndicated content on your desktop (eek!), or in the sidebar of your web browser. I know of several projects that have (or soon will) result in backend scripts that take a newsfeed and render it as Javascript code that can be included in any old webpage.
Another useful script that I haven't seen yet but expect to run across any day now will query the newfeed(s) of your choice at a given time every morning, and send you any new entries via email.
And of course, now you can include a newsfeed in any BML capable text field on Berylium, with a simple [rdf:url] command. Which makes me happy, because I feel like I've closed a loop programmatically-- you have been able to see any Berylium folder as a newsfeed since last summer. So now I can finally syndicate my own content.
If only the Astronomy Picture of the Day were so slick.
By Psydeshow on January 11, 2003 at 3:22pm