Web Syndication
Do you ever find yourself in the following situation:
You’re sitting in front of your computer with the web browser open, and you’re about to read the blogs of your friends. You go to a blog, only to find that it hasn’t been updated since the last time you visited it. You go to the next blog, but it looks like that one hasn’t been updated since your list visit neither. You repeat the process for all of the blogs that you know of and find out that only one or two of them have been updated.
If that sounds familiar to you, then perhaps you may be interested in the concept of web syndication.
Pretty much all blogs out there have “feeds” that essentially describe the content of posts. This content is stored in a consistent format so that it is very easy for tools to read the content for a whole bunch of blogs in one go. A lot of news sites also use these feeds to allow people to work out when these sites are updated with new headlines/stories (e.g. SMH’s feeds can be found here).
So what does this mean for you?
It means that you no longer waste time loading up all of the blogs (or news sites for that matter) that have not been updated since your last visit. It also means that you don’t end up neglecting sites that don’t update as frequently as others. You only need to visit the sites that have been updated, and you won’t miss out on an update from a site that updates only infrequently.
In my field of work, it is pretty much a necessity to keep up with the latest changes in technology. I subscribe to a number of technology news sites via their feeds and I get regular updates through them. Since a large percentage of my online time is spent reading up on the latest happenings, I use a feed reader (Sage) that is integrated with my browser (Firefox).
So, I hope this is useful to you if you’re not familiar with the joys of web syndication.