Many weblogs and news portals syndicate their blog posts and news articles using RSS, a set of standards that allow news aggregators to check regularly for new postings and display them in a convenient interface organized chronologically and by topic or category.

News feeds are usually marked with a white on orange XML icon. You could also use a centralized syndication service, such as Syndic8.com or NewsIsFree.

How to syndicate a news feed. There are sites that help to validate the news feed (see below).

The RSS standards themselves are controversial and still in development. Ben Hammersley's book, Content Syndication with RSS, explains the technology.

The Aggregator or News Reader is a most powerful complement to the weblog or news portal. It allows weblog and news subscribers to scan quickly all the latest posts from many blogs and portals.

 

Jon Udell described aggregators at the October 2003 BloggerCon at Harvard Law School Berkman Center for Internet and Society. You can see and hear his presentation as it was webcast.

As with CMS, you can buy aggregator software and run it on your own web server or use an open-source aggregator. Some are provided as ASP hosting services.