According to Phil Rignalda:

... we need to not lose sight of the fact that reading in an aggregator isn't the only use for RSS.

While Dave Winer argues, with maybe a trace of regret, that:

... the word syndication originally comes from the idea of including the content of a syndicated news source in another publication. But that really has fallen off. That's the "dark side" of syndication...

Well, it's a fact that RSS syndicated content these days is mainly fed into news readers and aggregators. But has the publishing side turned dark forever ? I'm not sure...

We may just be lacking the proper non nerdy tools to make better use of RSS in publication, and those tools may be right behind the corner, considering what is already available.

Here is a first example: I'm publishing in RSS format a collection of quotes, s l a m:shorts, that I gather while reading my subscribed feeds in Radio Userland's aggregator.

I then auto-syndicate this content into other pages published with Radio, such as this one, by placing activeRenderer's rssbox macro into my pages' template, producing the column on the right if you are reading the HTML version of this story. For an alternate, non outlined result, I could have used Userland's xml.rss.viewRssBox macro.

Since the s l a m:shorts feed is available on the Web, there's nothing preventing other like-minded publishers to do the same.

Like-minded publishers... Hmmm... I've recently seen a service published by Dave Winer at Harvard, Share Your Opml, that let me find out other bloggers sharing my interests by comparing our aggregator subscription lists.

What if those like-minded publishers were doing the same thing as I am, publishing their quick links to a dedicated RSS feed ? Then, with Userland's multi-author tool, I could aggregate all these feeds into a common 'shorts' feed which would be richer than any of its single sources, and we could all syndicate it in our weblog pages, providing our readers with more interesting and varied content.

What's missing right now is a single, easy to use software tool that would make the above scenario accessible to another audience than computer scientists and software engineers.

Second example: let's look at the blogosphere from a distance - it's not only made of teenage girl diary entries; as a matter of fact, it's bursting with original content in all conceivable disciplines. Better yet, most of this content is available in RSS (ok maybe Atom :-) format for a while, and we have more and more sophisticated tools, from trackbacks to RSS search engines, to locate it efficiently.

I would argue that weblogging is not only an author's dream, it is (or will soon become) an editor's dream. Most people associate journalism with writing. I've spent enough time in daily newspapers to know that it's only part of the job. Papers would not exist without people whose job it is to organise the available writing material, decide on sequences, hierarchy of information, association with photo or graphic material, and so on.

Now suppose you're a new kind of web publisher. You're not interested in publishing an online diary: you may not have that much to say in the first place, or maybe you find the diary format boring.

Anyway, after spending more and more time in your news aggregator, you've become interested in bringing several different pieces of information together, and produce an original web paper, on a more or less regular basis. The selection of textual and graphic content from the RSS pool, the page layout and styles, will convey your contribution and increase the readership of the original pieces.

The only desktop tool I know which is somewhere on the path of making this vision possible, with considerable hacks, is Radio Userland, because it has most of the necessary components: a news aggregator, a publishing mechanism, and an extensible scripting environment. It is missing an advanced, edition oriented aggregator interface (I've started working on that with activeRenderer's browser) and an easy to use, CSS enabled, layout design tool (I'll work on that next).

If I - and other interested parties - can make a prototype work, then we'll be on our way to creating the next generation Web publishing system, bringing the dark side of syndication back to light.

[s l a m]