I think we should probably stop calling it syndication (kottke.org)
Duh. This is one of those ‘elephant in the drawing room’ moments: we all know a thing is there but we don’t acknowledge its presence.
Syndication is defined as selling (an article or cartoon) for publication in many magazines or newspapers at the same time; “he received a comfortable income from the syndication of his work”.
So unless your stuff is being harvested and republished (the Remix Culture rears it’s head), syndication is not an accurate description: publishing is a perfectly fine one, though.
We see a lot of work being done on clients and new feed formats (the seven nine flavors of RSS and now Atom) but what about tools that take and remix feeds, that take related or similar elements of different feeds and repackage those? Suppose I want BoingBoing‘s Japanese pop culture tidbits, Wonkette‘s laceratingly snarky coverage of the presidential campaign and Gary Murphy‘s notes of networked knowledge applications, all in one feed. Any way to do that without rolling my own tool?
Hmm, sounds a lot like that personalized newspaper we’ve been hearing about since Marc Andreesen was in short pants. But that’s syndication in action.