We have multiple writers who are going to syndicate their content across a network of 10-20 websites. These websites all have different CMS’s and some may be straight HTML. What is the best widget to use to publish the article once somewhere and have it syndicated across all these sites (assuming they’ve all changed their code to somehow include this widget). I realize RSS can do this but I guess we are looking for something a little more rich looking than that.
Yahoo! Pipes allow you to mix up your content together in various ways.
That is very interesting and we might be able to use it for some things but we really need to be able to syndicate rich articles with images, etc. I don’t think it would be that easy to do with Pipes.
If you are looking for something a little “richer” than RSS it might be worth you checking out Atom, it’s very much like RSS except it supports a wider range of relational information and mark-up tags (though if the visuals are the issue, why not use XSLT to transform the RSS feed into something “prettier” and use some CSS to glamour it up for people not using a reader which overrides the defaults)? 
You might Find Atom the most appropriate one…
They are an rss feed generator that is very rich. You can post images and even video players right in the feed!
Plus there are multiple widgets available for different styling purposes.
Wouldn’t Google consider it “duplicate content” and ban the url if the same articles might be posted on multiple sites? Google is known to remove duplicates from its database…
Content syndication is a method by which writings find their way around the ether of the Internet. Specifically, one article that a person writes could appear, with the writer’s permission, on many websites. The key word there is permission, which the writer is supposed to give before a website reprints his or her article. In many cases today, because it is so easy to cut and paste electronically, articles appear in syndication without the requisite author permission.