You can take advantage of the public beta stage and have an opportunity to provide your website with another avenue to increase it's Internet presence. Headline syndication is a great way to build awareness of your content and your brand, drive traffic to your site, and serve your existing readership -- with relative ease and without expense. Invest a small amount of time to create your RSS file and you can essentially distribute headlines to many sources with very minimal ongoing work and virtually no overhead.
Not only can syndication help build stronger relationships with existing readers who want to know as soon as new content gets posted, it will also help attract new readers. And now, with My Yahoo! introducing the RSS format to its broad audience, publishers and bloggers who choose to syndicate will gain access to the millions of readers who visit My Yahoo! every day.
Yahoo is also maintaining an RSS feed directory in parallel with the service. The current RSS versions that it supports are RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 1.0, and 2.0. To date, this directory includes thousands of the most popular blogs and web sites that publish RSS feeds, but it is by no means exhaustive.
Getting into the the directory is very simple. If you have a My!Yahoo account, then all you have to do is add your RSS feed to your personal page. Each time you add a feed to My Yahoo!, the RSS directory is automatically updated. Once the feed in the directory anyone can discover it via the RSS search function.
Millions of Internet users visit My!Yahoo each day. To take advantage of that you can promote the fact that your content is available to be added to their personal page. Yahoo makes it easy for your visitors to add your headlines to My!Yahoo by putting a simple "Add to My Yahoo!" button on your site.
Once your feed is published at Yahoo, you will want to make sure that your latest posts appear immediately by using Yahoo's API. Yahoo's system will schedule an immediate refresh of your site so that My Yahoo! has the most up-to-date version of the RSS feed. The two interfaces currently available are: REST and XML-RPC. Example request and response.
If you publish a weblog (blog) or personal web site, consult the FAQs associated with your publishing software or hosting service to learn how to enable RSS on your platform. Many programs and services offer built-in tools to publish and update your RSS file easily. Yahoo does not support ATOM feeds -- but plans to expand other formats in the future. It is not clear whether this will be one of them. ATOM feeds are the standard for blogs created at Google's Blogger.com website.
If you are a webmaster or developer who manages a more robust or custom content management system, there are several tutorials that can help you get started. Here are just a few existing resources:
- O'Reilly's RSS DevCenter: http://www.oreillynet.com/topics/rss/getting_started
- Lockergnome's RSS Resource: http://rss.lockergnome.com/resources/
- RSS Tutorial: http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/
For the complete FAQ for RSS Publishers at Yahoo, visit http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html
Further information can be found at http://www.bandofgonzos.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=495
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