How do I get One Website Content to Another Site? - Web Syndication, Curation, Aggregation, Feeds and Scraping

CONCEPTS behind Web Syndication

What is Web Syndication?

• A form of syndication where
• content is made available from one website to other sites

Why use Web Syndication?

• Effective way of adding greater depth and immediacy of information to pages, making it more attractive to users
• Increases exposure to providing site by generating a form of advertisement.
• Highly effective strategy for link building
• Enables content creators to amortize the cost of producing content by licensing it across multiple publishers or maximise distribution of advertising-supported content

What are the Pitfalls of Web Syndication?

• For Content creators
  • Content creators may find it difficult to aggregate a large enough audience to support the creation of high quality content
  • Content creators may lose control over presentation of content when they syndicate to other parties
• For Publishers
  • When content is duplicated at other publisher sites, they cannot have "exclusive" on content
• For Users
  • Syndication may be replicated else where and can be annoying

2 Types of content syndicated

• RSS and Atom Feeds: headlines, summaries and modified version of original full content displayed on users' feed readers.
• Full content: unaltered content includes text, audio, video, applications/widgets or user-generated content

Monetizing Web Syndication

• 3 kinds of Partnerships formed between content producers and distribution outlets
  • Licensing Content: distribution partners pay a fee to content creators for right to publish content
  • Ad-supported Content: publishers share revenues derived from advertising on syndicated content with contents' producer
  • Free or barter syndication: No money exchanges hands. Producers may generate revenues from another source such as embedded advertising or subscriptions
• 2 Methods for selecting distribution partners
  • Hand-pick syndication partners based on specific criteria e.g. size or quality of audiences
  • Content creators allow publisher sites or users to "opt in" to carry the content through automated system that screen potential publishers to ensure material is not in an inappropriate environment.

CONCEPTS behind Web Feeds

What are web feeds, News feed, syndicated feeds?

• A data format
• used for providing users with frequently updated content
• Examples of Push Technology
• Kinds of centent delivered are HTML or links to webpages and other digital media
• Used by news websites, weblogs, schools and podcasters

Why use Web Feeds?

• Users do not disclose email address when subscribing to a feed and are not exposed to email pitfalls. e.g. spam, viruses, phishing and identity theft.
• Users do not have to send unsubscribe request. Just remove feed from aggregator
• Feed items are automatically sorted that each URL has its own sets of entries.
• Easier for users to keep track of content and staying up to date with content from large number of sites
• Makes easier for other sites to link to content and updated automatically

CONCEPTS behind Scraping

What is Scraping?

• When a website does not provide a feed, and the viewer forcefully creates a feed for it by scraping it.
• Authors are not informed.

CONCEPTS behind Web Aggregation

What are Web Aggregators

1. What is it?
   1. Website, Client software or Web Application
   2. Aggregates Syndicated Web Content or specific information from multiple Online Sources
   3. In One Location for easy viewing
2. Examples of what is being aggregated?
   1. Online Newspapers
   2. Blogs
   3. Podcasts
   4. Video Blogs
3. Types of Aggregators
   1. Data aggregator - an organization involved in compiling information from detailed databases on individuals and selling that information to others
   2. News aggregator - a computer software or website that aggregates news from other news sources
   3. Poll aggregator - a website that aggregates polling data for upcoming elections
   4. Review aggregator - a website that aggregates reviews of movies or other products or services
   5. Search aggregator - software that runs on a user's computer and fetches, filters, and organizes a specific search from various search engines
   6. Social network aggregation - the collection of content from multiple social network services
   7. Video aggregator - a website that collects and organizes online video sources
   8. Blog aggregator - a website that collects and organizes blog sources
   9. Payment aggregator - a software that handle the payment transaction and do the final settlement.
   10. Smart Grid aggregator - an entity that directly or indirectly controls the energy consumption of many distributed energy resources
4. Aggregator Methods
   1. RSS (Really Simple Syndication/ Rich Site Summary)
      1. Synchronised subscription system
      2. Uses XML to structure pieces of information
      3. Aggregated in feed reader --> Displays information in user-friendly interface

Reference

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregator