The idea of syndicating content among many websites is not new. Sharing things for free is great! After all, that's what Internet is all about.
In the world of easy copy-and-paste stealing somebody's copyrighted web content, why would one care about special syndication service? The difference is that unauthorized copying is illegal! So, let's do this right.
Another advantage of syndication, - it's LIVE!
"The key idea here is that you're not including a stale copy of old text, you're including a live copy of whatever the other site has on it at the moment. We do this with images all the time ... but it's not really done with text on the web." (Ted Nelson)
"Just Imagine Getting Other People To Create Your Web Pages" - says one ad.
The most popular types of syndicating are the following:
1. Server-side Includes
PHP is probably the best professional approach to pull in files from other sites. Inserted fragments literally become a part of your page, - Google will index them as if it's your content.
2. Client-side JavaScripts
For years, some articles are distributed via easy-to-use JavaScript service. However, on a destination webpage they are invisible for search engines. Google would rather index the source domain. Yet, it's still an excellent way for promoting your content or personal branding.
Just couple months ago, Anil Dash published an exciting article "Embedded Journalism", which starts from the words
"I want you to place the text of this blog post on your own site":
"I've created a javascript embed tag at the bottom of every post on my blog, to let you embed the title, an excerpt of the post, and a list of commenters on the post in your own blog or site."
Will the feature attract more readers? Well, maybe. It's probably better to start with attracting more webmasters. Javascript is less then perfect for that purpose.
In general, syndication has been designed for webmasters. Unlike webpage customization (e.g., defining a personal stylesheet), which is for visitors. However, if you want to reach as many visitors as possible, you should appeal to webmasters first.
And even assuming the motivation is not a key priority for most enthusiasts, there is a much bigger problem, - their TRUST.
Syndication is mostly a matter of trust. Pulling in a content from somebody's site to live on your site means you've got to trust the person. That's why this can work for a famous blogger, and ... practically can't for the most of websites.
So, to make your syndication success, you should become popular first. However, it's not an easy thing to do if you are unknown AND offer no syndication. What about making success
because of your syndication? It may work only in the case you are becoming famous for introducing a novel way for that.
Today I'm introducing an original
Mini-Sharing Initiative, and related syndication service at my website. For those who want to be a part of that, there is just one condition: Your files must be compatible with the proposed mini format. In particular, they must be small, contain a limited number of hyperlinks, - and absolutely no ads and scripts, let alone viruses or spyware.
Initially, I was thinking about distributing short excerpts from my articles. People on the Internet do it all the time. For example, how could I resist to not citing Liza Sabater:
"Quoting is beautiful thing and people shouldn't be paranoid about people taking bits and pieces of their stuff as inspiration for their writing."
Then, my idea was about a "middle" version. Result could look like RSS output, but bigger in size. Bigger than digest, but smaller then full content. For example, truncate your webpage, add title with hyperlink to original source, and save it as a new file! Then let webmasters fill their pages with many such excerpts.
Finally, I've decided to focus on the
"HTML stripping", -
distributing content and HTML formatting separately! In result, people can assemble a webpage from several files.
The idea is to create a framework for FAST browsing content sites!
In addition, let others define my site's identity: If you believe you are a better webmaster, please, go ahead!