I'm publishing on the web and syndicated, as unbelievable as that sounds. This is a whole journey for me that I started in early June as I was recovering from minor surgery. I had been following blogs and RSS syndication (read further for a brief explanation of RSS) for some time. I even started teaching about RSS as the breaking wave in service oriented architectures in courses at Michigan Business School in early 2003. But, it's really only in the past year that things have launched away from the extreme cutting edge into the main stream.
The thrill of this is not so much having a blog, a sort of easy to update web page with little articles (what you are reading now) but the ability to have this content syndicated.
A short word of explanation is required about what syndication means; I find non-technical friends just don't get this. When you syndicate your content, what you write on your web site is easily available to be published on other web sites. The version of syndication used with blogs is called RSS.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a family of competing XML formats that provide the technical plumbing to make syndication possible. You can even make your site's content available for publication on MyYahoo!'s front page (see this link for how), an honor that used to be the result of a financial transaction.
In most cases, only a summary of your content is syndicated, forcing people to go to your site for more. That said, people providing full syndication feeds of their sites content (i.e., all of the content, not just a summary) report dramatic increases in site traffic as people subscribe to their feeds.
So, the obvious benefit of syndication is increased site traffic (as discussed in this article). Like so many things on the Internet, how you benefit from this increased exposure depends on you and your site.
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