Book cover via AmazonIf you’re like me, a funny cartoon causes a chuckle to turn into a guffaw and the next thing you know, your face is beet-red, you’re convulsing, and you need to pee. It doesn’t happen with every cartoon, but some of Sunday’s newspaper funnies are, well, funny!
I bring up the funnies as a means to describe RSS, internet jargon for Really Simple Syndication, which is a fancy way of describing the layout of newspaper comic strips. There’s usually a logic to the order, with Garfield and Dilbert near the top, Doonesbury and Ziggy and Spiderman in the middle, and the one-panel cartoons off to the side.
Each cartoon has a headline and some sort of attribution, whether a website URL or the cartoonist’s name or initials.
While every newspaper editor differs on the quantity of cartoons based on available pages, whether the printed cartoons are color or black-and-white, and how many cartoons will be from nationally-recognized artists or from local talent, there is a universal element that all editors share: the content is not produced in-house.
In other words, a cartoonist can work anywhere in the world — Los Angeles, New York, Istanbul, Paris, Christchurch — and the final product is typically granted or sold to a distributor (such as King Feature Syndicate, United Media, or Tribune Media Services) who syndicates the work worldwide to various press outlets for publication.
Once a newspaper receives the cartoon through e-mail or some other communicative method, the cartoon is printed. That’s the nutshell of really simple syndication in the print world.
This blog post is syndicated, too.
Every time I publish a new article, my “post” is added to a running list of past posts of mine which is collectively called my “feed.” If you think of every Dilbert cartoon that Scott Adams drew, the entire collection could be construed as a feed.
My feed is syndicated by a company called FeedBurner, recently acquired by Google.
The goal of having a feed is for people to subscribe, or follow, the information. For instance, if you look at the top and right of my blog, you will see orange symbols like 
that indicate you can follow new content on my feed, not unlike a newspaper following a cartoonist.
Suppose you visit dozens of blogs and other sites with changing content. To be more productive and save time by visiting every site bookmarked in your browser or on del.icio.us, you can subscribe to your frequently-visited blogs by adding their feeds to a feed reader that aggregates all of your feeds into an easy-to-read layout.
Alternatively to subscribing to a feed in a reader, you can voluntarily opt-in to receive new posts of mine every morning by e-mail.
The following video helps explain the overall concept of RSS and syndication:
According to FeedBurner statistics, there are 1,993,406 feeds that it syndicates, representing 1,125,264 unique publishers (as some people can have more than one feed, such as having two blogs).
My feed is one of those nearly 2 million feeds.
The takeaway here is the next time you open your browser and find yourself visiting the same blog over and over and over, you can choose to either follow the feed in a reader or receive updates by email.
Or, you can do neither but then I may laugh at you for spending unnecessary time visiting my site every day.
Does this help explain RSS and syndication for you? I’d heard from many people that they were confused about what the term meant. I hope things are a little clearer; I know it’s confusing!
Related posts:
Comments:
Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
978-558-0008
ConvoTrack
{ 1 trackback }
Comments on this entry are closed.