HeadlineSyndication

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Often changes to a website are trackable chronologically. These changes are often coarse-grained enough to have descriptive titles. From the analogy to newspapers, these are called headlines even if the titles may not graphically delineate the starts of the articles. Syndicating only the headlines of a website provides a quick summary of what is going on that site. Contrast this to now popular "headline news" television formats where only "Today's headlines" scroll along a marquis at the bottom of the screen.

Commonly, the entries of a WebLog are made available to display as a sidebar on other web sites through RichSiteSummary, or allow readers to skim multiple sites at once through a ChangeAggregator. Beat somewhat awkwardly into the same mechanism, the RecentChanges of a wiki can be made available through the ModWiki RSS extension, even if it is somewhat bogus to claim the "headline" of a change is the name of a page. Syndicating RecentChanges leads to a special case of a ChangeAggregator called UnifiedRecentChanges.

An older yet richer format than RSS is the ChannelDefinitionFormat from Microsoft. This format can do more than HeadlineSyndication, however.

HeadlineSyndication is only one form of PeerToPeerSyndication. Due to the popularity of WebLogs it is currently the most common on the Internet.

HeadlineSyndication

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