Why's it called Syndication?

Joffrey Koliante asked…

I keep asking myself what does “syndicate” mean. I would say that Syndicators are systems that make any content available as an XML feed. When syndicators syndicate content, this is called syndication.

Right ?

So why do so many blogs, especially Movable Type powered ones, write “Syndicate this site” rather than “Aggregate this site?”

The short answer is: because the original use for XML content feeds was truly syndication and the term stuck.

RSS was first used by Netscape in their My Netscape portal. Content providers would syndicate their headlines to Netscape using RSS, a file format that they invented. The acronym meant “Rich Site Summary.” When RSS began being used by individuals to grab content from multiple locations for display in an aggregator, the term “Rich Site Summary started to become less and less accurate. Much of the content was not summaries at all, but rather the content in its entirety. So a new meaning for the acronym was invented: “Really Simple Syndication.”

If you want the long answer instead of my oversimplification of the history of RSS, poke around the Web looking for information about Dave Winer, Netscape, and the different versions of RSS: 0.91, 0.92, 1.0 and 2.0.

One of the meanings of syndication is the distribution of content to multiple locations for simultaneous publication. So in that sense, syndication is a good term for what is occurring. However, the act of consuming the content (what the end users are doing when they “syndicate this site”) is not technically syndication.

While “aggregate this site” is probably a better description, “syndicate” is in common use and probably won’t go away anytime soon. But I’d argue that neither term is very good if you want mainstream Internet users to pick up on content feeds.