Embedding is one of the most empowering techniques available to student and teacher bloggers, effectively allowing free syndication of content created by others. In website design, embedding is the process of taking content from one site and displaying it within your own. It is easy to confuse this process with copy and paste, however it is subtly different. With copy and paste the blogger is actually moving the content into their site. Embedding on the other hand, simply displays the content remotely from its original content. As an example of embedding, consider the books displayed on the right-hand side of this site.

Online services (such as Delicious, LibraryThing and YouTube) encourage people to embed their content as it drives traffic to their sites, and helps spread the word on what they offer. For bloggers, embedding provides a rich alternative to simply linking to content, allowing for the creation of a site based on the principle of mashup, where something new is created from a series of new and existing elements.

Different blogging platforms apply different restrictions to embedding, as certain techniques can pose security risks. By far the most flexible approach is to host your own blog using an open source platform (such as WordPress), although this requires a certain level of technical expertise and a small financial overhead. A reasonable alternative is to use a hosted solution, (of where there are many such as Blogger, WordPress.com, TypePad and LiveJournal). Of all the hosted solutions that I have tried, Blogger provides the best combination of flexibility, structure, features and ease of use. That said, occasionally an embed fails to work (e.g. Delicious link role), and a workaround is required (e.g. using the equivalent RSS feed).