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I don’t see what the deal is with syndication. I think its a fancy term for a directory listing in XML. Just like online shops provide their products as XML feeds for various affiliates to advertise, RSS & Atom feeds advertise content. As a directory listing, RSS should only contain a preview / thumbnail / summary of content, thus allowing it to act as an advertisement similar to adSense and sponsored search results.

Yes, I know, you want access to the full content in your RSS reader, not just the summary. But that isn’t the purpose of RSS. As a listing, it simply points to objects. If you want your RSS reader to show you these objects directly (instead of viewing them in your browser) they have to be written that way: the content must provide an alternative rendering of itself (HTML, XML, plain text, video, etc) that your RSS reader would understand (note: your RSS reader may understand HTML already, so what you really want is to display only the text, removing any ads that the content provider may need to generate revenue and publish that content in the first place). But of course, content rendering is in the hands of the publisher.

Yet don’t underestimate the power of a universal format for a directory listing. What I find surprising is the fact that the web never had one from the very beginning, because after all its a distributed file system. Directory listings serve the purpose of a sitemap, allowing search engines and RSS readers to syndicate content (Google’s sitemaps can be in RSS) and easily determine what has been added/updated/modified. It is then somewhat surprising that RSS came from the blogosphere, as it is a general method of formating a directory listing that may soon become a building block of the WWW.