Web Content Syndication with RSS and ICE

Web Content Syndication with RSS and ICE

Not only does metadata play a critical role in the content-repository phase of content management, but it plays an important role in the content-delivery phase as well. Content delivery on the Web is often referred to as syndication.

In its simplest sense, syndication is the delivery of content from a content provider, or syndicator, to a content consumer, or subscriber. Syndication may be a one-to-one rela-tionship, but typically is a one-to-many relationship.

In the early days, syndicated content was distributed by wire services. Today,

the Web makes a perfect channel for almost instantaneous syndication for all kinds of Web content.

Two standard content-syndication mechanisms have emerged since the late 1990s to enable automated syndication on the Web. The first, RSS, emerged from the open-source community as a simple mechanism to enable the syndication of headlines. This light-weight syndication protocol is simple to use and inexpensive to implement. A second, more robust syndication protocol, Information and Content Exchange (ICE), was devel-oped by industry content-providers and software vendors. ICE was developed to auto-mate the negotiation of subscription characteristics and to address the need to automate the scheduled, reliable, secure redistribution of any content for publishers and for non-commercial content providers.