Hook, Line & Thinker newsletter, published by Troutdream Graphics - April, 2003

Syndication – Part 1

I came across a very cool thing this month. I think it might be easiest to explain if I begin with a case study.

The Next Phase Consultancy provides business development services to medical device manufacturers. In order to make their site "sticky" (that is, keep people coming back again and again) we decided to provide up-to-the-minute white papers and articles on issues related to the medical device industry, healthcare and medical therapies. Sites that offer relevant, regularly updated news, articles and commentary create both interest and a sense of competence, depth and experience.

To find content, we looked to RSS syndication. RSS is a protocol that was developed and then abandoned by Netscape in 1999. Now it is becoming widely used to allow sites to publish "news feeds" – basically, tiny databases of headlines, summaries and links created by content authors. Feeds can be incorporated into web pages easily. You need only set up the code one time, then each time someone views your site, they will automatically see the most recent articles from the news feed provider with no additional effort on your part. Some content providers charge fees to access their feeds, but there are thousands available for free.

A win/win proposition

Here's how it works: Publishers write the articles, create the feeds and keep them up to date. Once you set up your site to access a feed, their latest headlines, summaries and links look like part of your site. If someone visiting your site wishes to read the full article, they click on the link and read it on the publisher's site. In other words, you get rich, fresh content for your site at no cost, and the publisher gets increased traffic to his site. The publisher's articles can appear in a separate window or frame so as not to take readers away from your site completely.

There are several sites that serve as RSS feed "aggregators" – that is, they collect feeds from sources all over the internet. Some aggregators charge fees for using their services, some offer the information for free. Some feeds are available for use anywhere, and some are for personal information only.* One aggregator that distributes free information about feeds is Syndic8.com – a collaborative effort that catalogs over 4500 sources of syndicated news headlines in 18 different languages.

Back to our case study: We searched Syndic8.com, found about six available, relevant news sources and created a page on the web site that links to these feeds. Here is The Next Phase's news feed page.

*Currently, most feeds are used internally to keep up to date on particular areas of interest. If you would like to begin using news feeds for research, you'll need a headline viewer – a small software program that allows you to subscribe to any feeds you're interested in. You can find out more and download a viewer from http://www.headlineviewer.com/ or http://www.feedreader.com/

Stay tuned! Next month I will describe how those of you who write original content can increase your site traffic and search engine rankings by creating and distributing your own news feed.

If you have a web-related question, drop me a line. If I don't know the answer, I'll find out.

You can find other articles and past issues of this newsletter at http://www.troutdream.com/stories.html

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