I currently volunteer for my fraternity’s chapter by helping them run the chapter website, which is also used by alumni to get in touch with each other. As any other fraternity, we have a national office which publishes information about events, news, and other bits of information for all chapters across the country.

We have a quarterly magazine or journal which publishes articles of interest as well as news items regarding other members. In addition to this journal, the National office sends monthly emails letting us know what is going on. Why do I bring this up? well because most recently I had an email exchange with the Director of Communications for our National office, asking him if they had any plans to syndicate their content.

My request is based in the fact that today, I am the person that has to navigate to the National website or any other place where they may publish their content, get some text of interest from this source and create the appropriate content in our own website. I only bring an article or an event to the attention of our visitors and I provide links to the original source as a sign of courtesy. However, this process is time consuming and I usually forget to make the rounds collections these pieces of information to supplement our own site. I would like to automate this process as much as possible without increased the workload on either one of us. Syndication technologies allow for this automation to take place and provides a win-win situation for all of us.

However, I realized that the person I was communicating with did not have a picture of what I was referring to. Requesting the raw text (through a feed) without any formatting appeared to be a strange request, without very much value. I offered to put something together that would allow him to get a better idea about what syndication can do for the National office, as well as for raising the level of content that can be offered to the local chapters.

So I am now looking for some resources that would allow me to introduce the idea of content syndication and its benefits to someone who is fresh to the idea. So far I have found a couple of quality documents, Mark Nottingham’s RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters and FeedBurner’s FAQ About RSS.