What's possibly in these "full syndication" deals for publications taking their material to other publications? We find most of them don't do us much good, with a few exceptions. (One good exception being partial syndication with some Huffington Post sections, particularly Business.) More and more, publications are throwing up their hands and just going with it. Syndication, once a brave act of sucking it all in for free, is now just the machines at work, folding the layer cake that is the Internet into itself over and over again. For example?

A couple of times in the last month, Gawker Media sites have been all, "Hey that piece on your site was great, can we syndicate it?" Now, I am old. And for us olds, "syndication" is a term of art in the world of publishing things. In this scheme, people who are self-employed make a living by selling their work, for usually small fees, to a number of different publishers. It's how things called "comics" used to work in newspapers (and currently "don't work" most likely). And columnists, and such. Not a bad system for all involved. And now there is a new kind of syndication, as explained [...]