When you spend countless hours blogging and monitoring your RSS feeds for fresh new content, you can lose sight of the fact that many people still do not know what RSS feeds are.

I even find certain bloggers that bury their subscription feed somewhere towards the bottom of their homepage. Once found it is often a simple link with no eye-catching graphic to draw the eye and a subsequent mouse click.

For education on what RSS is, and encouragement and ease for people to subscribe, incorporate a Feed Icon in to your blog.  Feed Icons sums it up best.

As far as RSS Aggregators go, check out Google Reader. I’ve used a few different ones, but so far I like this one the best. I really like the fact that I can view all the content, including photos and video, right there in the view pane. The “Mark all as Read” feature saves me considerable time, and I can manage my subscriptions depending on what I am looking, what I feel like reading, and what I read the most. One thing I would really like though is if Google would add the ability to comment right in the Reader.

Also, if you are using things like Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and Search it just makes sense to keep it all organized into one account.

Finally, because Google just recently bought Feedburner, I am sure we will see some cool new features coming out of that acquisition. Hopefully one of the first things will be Feed stats within the analytics reporting.

tags: RSS, Feeds, Icons, Google, Reader

Yahoo fell in love with RSS back in 2004 and 2005.  Everything they did was RSS enabled and they did a lot to bring RSS to the mainstream with tools like My.Yahoo.com.  However, it appears that this love affair is waining in favor of page views.   The majority of Yahoo’s business model is based off advertising which requires readers to come to their website where the ads are visible.  RSS is a great way of distributing and consuming information, but it doesn’t require the user to go back to the mother ship.

The proof of this possible change in strategy?  Steve Rubel points to three new sites launched by Yahoo:  Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV.  All have fantastic use cases for RSS.  None of them have it.

So what does this mean for RSS?  I think it means that instead of companies jumping in with both feet, they will need to evaluate whether RSS makes sense for their model.  Companies that don’t rely on page views to track success will continue to use RSS.  Those that rely on advertising and other monetizing efforts will need to evaluate the pros and cons.

Seth Sutel, an AP Business Writer wrote a recent article titled, “What are RSS Feeds on the Internet and How Can I Use Them?” Most of our readers are already familiar with RSS, but not everyone is using them. If you are not, please read this article, and then move to step 2 - implementation.

RSS is becoming a common means of consuming information for many people. By providing this alternate channel of communication, you are recognizing the varying preferences of your customers and satisfying them. Furthermore, you are increasing the likelihood that your message will be read.

Weather, stock quotes, news, press releases, blog posts, concert schedules, the list goes on. Information such as this can be delivered via RSS and organized into a convenient and easy-to-use RSS aggregator like MyYahoo, Google, and Bloglines.

That way you don’t have to go out and get the information, “RSS brings the Web to you.”

tags: RSS, Feeds, Google, MyYahoo, Bloglines

On their own, Google’s Personalized Home Page and Google’s Reader are nothing too special.  The personalized homepage is much like my.yahoo.com, protopage, live.com or any other single page that aggregates feeds.  You can subscribe to a feed by RSS URL or by searching their directory and the feed is displayed on your home page with the latest 1 - 9 headlines based off your preferences.

Google’s Reader, on the other hand, lets you subscribe to feeds and view them by site or aggregated a la a newsgator.com or rojo.com.  You can tag feeds with different labels (Google’s term for tags) and all view an aggregated feed by this label.  So for example, you can subscribe to Micro Persuasion, Seth Godin and Horse Power and label them all Marketing.  When you click on the Marketing label in Reader, it shows these three blogs posts in a single feed.

Now here is the powerful part.  Google’s Personalized Home Page has a widget that allows you to view your Google Reader subscriptions by label.  So instead of the three blogs taking up three spots on the home page you can view all three aggregated into one spot.  Do this with a few topics and you have a page that can allow you to get huge snapshots of the parts of the blogosphere that you’re most interested in.

But wait there’s more.  When you use this Reader Widget, clicking on the headline of a post doesn’t whisk you away to that site.  Instead it opens it up nicely in a floating content box.  You can read the post and click on the next post.  After reading a post, the post is no longer bold and clicking refresh will remove it from your home page.  This combines the best parts of a RSS based home page with the best parts of an RSS news aggregator.

If your interested in how many people are reading your blog, you need to obviously track visitors.  This can be done quickly and cheaply using Google Analytics.  Google Analytics used to require an invitation code, but recently Google made it freely available to anyone.  After you sign up for an account, you simply cut and paste code into your blog template (usually the footer or the bottom of the page template) and off you go.  Its not quite real time - usually 8 - 12 hours behind, meaning if I log in now (AM on Thursday), I will see the stats for end of day yesterday.  Google Analytics tracks all the web stats that you’re used to seeing in your websites analytics program (assuming you have one).  If not, you could use Google Analytics on your site as well as your blog.

Google Analytics won’t track the readers who view your content through their news readers.  In order to do this, you need a tool like Feedburner.  Feedburner is also free.  When you create an account it takes the feed from your existing blog and turns it into a new feed.  This new feed - in the form of a URL - can then be applied to your blog templates so when readers subscribe, they are actually subscribing to the Feedburner feed rather than your blogs feed (You can tell a Feedburner feed because it starts with feeds.feedburner.com/.  Pay attention to how many bloggers do this).  At any point, you can log into Feedburner and it will tell you how many subscribers your feed has.

It’s very important to note that if you’re one of those bloggers that likes to change your templates, or you are in the process of creating a new template, you will need to apply the analytics code and the Feedburner URLs to every template you use.  If not, you risk missing web traffic stats or worse, having users subscribe to the wrong feed.

Hope this is helpful to those just getting started.

A trackback represents an effective means of communicating between blogs. If a blog trackbacks to another blogger’s post, then that post will appear in both places. Bloggers use trackbacks to continue conversations in the blogosphere, as well as capitalize on web traffic by directing visitors from one blog to their own blog.

There are some best practices to consider when doing trackbacks:

• Only trackback to a blog post when it is relevant to your post.Trackbacks are a means of extending, improving, or elaborating upon a particular subject. Trackback only when you are contributing to the conversation.
• Do not trackback to a post that has nothing to do with your post. People can tell when you are doing a trackback simply to drive traffic to your blog. This type of practice will diminish your reputation and your brand.
• Before doing a trackback, consider whether you would allow a trackback from the other author. While the rules of blogging are relatively unwritten, you do not want to get blasted in the blogosphere for being rude, unfair or dishonest. Be truthful and transparent.
• Before doing a trackback, make sure the blog you are going to appear on does not negatively impact your brand or drive visitors you do not want.
• If you have more than one blog, and you are doing multiple postings, make sure your software removes the trackback after the first post (you may have to do it manually); otherwise, your trackback will appear each time you post.
• There is nothing wrong with doing trackbacks to multiple blogs that are discussing the same subject. Simply follow the above rules and include all of you trackbacks at once to avoid having to publish your post again. If you post and then find another blog entry that you would like to do an additional trackback to, make sure you remove the first trackback if your software does not do it for you.

Am I missing any? Clearly, you have to be reading other people’s blogs to utilize trackbacks. RSS is key to successfully staying on top of your favorite blogs. If you do not have an aggregator like Bloglines, My Yahoo, or Google, you need to start.

Technorati : RSS, blogging, blogosphere, trackbacks

For a while now I’ve been telling clients that search engines love blogs.  In fact, when doing research for this post most of the results from Google were blog postings.  Here’s five reasons I believe blogs provide great SEO:

1. Fresh content - If a search engine has the option of showing content created in 2002 about a topic, or a post made a few days ago, it will likely choose the new post.
2. Linking - Search Engine algorithms look at outgoing and incoming links to a site.  Since most business related sites choose not to link to other sites (the “lets keep them on our site as long as possible” mentality), they rank rather low in outgoing links.  And since they aren’t linking to others, others are less likely to link to them.
3. Keyword Rich - Blog posts are short.  Because of that, bloggers get to the point and tend to use more keywords then a jargon filled page written by a marketer and passed through multiple revision processes.  Also, blog posts are categorized and tagged adding more keywords to the content.
4. Good content - When a blogger is blogging multiple times a week, they can only say so much about the same topics before it becomes repetitive and boring: so they stretch.  They blog about how their topics are applied to other industries.  They blog about related news and information.  They blog about anything that fits into their area of expertise.  This creates new unique content that is valuable.  When someone searches for these obscure - or niche - topics, these posts float to the top.
5. RSS - Blogs have RSS feeds.  Search engines are paying more attention to RSS feeds as they provide a clear and concise version of the content without any old school SEO tricks.  An RSS feed contains the post’s date, title, full or abbreviated text, tags, enclosures and other relevant information.  They can’t be faked with a ton of keywords in the sites presentation or meta data.

There are other factors that go into search algorithms besides these and these factors alone will not a first result make.  Please feel free to add any of your own thoughts in the comments below or by emailing me at jkenzer@twelvehorses.com.

tags: SEO, Blogs, Google, Yahoo, Search Engines, RSS

Yesterday morning I attended a Roundtable discussion put on by the Sierra Nevada Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America focused on the relevancy of journalism in today’s public relations market. In fact, our Director of Business Development, Josh Kenzer was one of the speakers.Before arriving to the event I was a little puzzled by the title, “Is Journalism Relevant in Today’s PR Market?,” because I thought, of course it’s relevant. A better title would consist of something like, why is journalism relevant in light of social media, or how has its role changed or been impacted. But the discussion ended up focusing heavily on new channels of distribution, search, blogging, podcasting, and new online social mediums or medias. Of course, I was happy that it did. Social media is having significant effects. If you haven’t seen any recent examples of how it has played a role check out what AOL recently had to deal with, or Dell, or Jupiter Research.Other topics of the discussion included truth, relevancy, media fragmentation, how impossible it is for journalists to report on everything, whether or not a blogger can really be a journalist, and the fact that pr professionals, reporters, and media companies are motivated by money. I certainly believe that both reporters and media outlets have a passion for truth, breaking news, and getting the facts straight, but there is still an undeniable and underlying influence attributed to money. PR professionals get paid to generate exposure just as much as media companies depend on advertisers.That does not change the fact that I am a news junky. I have my RSS feeds setup, receive my email newsletters, read cnn.com, nytimes.com, my local newspaper, turn on the TV at night for more local and national news, PBS, and, you guessed it, the Daily Show. From a local perspective, I am often frustrated when I simply see AP stories regurgitated, or some TV reporter sitting on the side of the road telling me its raining or snowing when I can simply look outside and see that it is. Bring me more in depth reporting about social, economic and environmental subjects. Take those paid reporters and put their energies toward something more meaningful - but to who? Me? Maybe they aren’t so concerned with me. Maybe their target market is the person who wants to see someone in their slicks standing by the side of the road in the rain. Many people are pretty apathetic about what is going on outside of their little sphere. I have friends that are this way.I appreciate the power of social media and self-expression, but I want it to resonate more in main stream media. Traditional media, namely print publications, are struggling to discover new channels of communication. They are looking at email, mobile, rss, blogging, podcasting, myspace, and the like, but I think they are considering it as a way of distributing the same old story; or advertisement. Maybe we as a collective whole can dig a little deeper than that.My biggest takeaway from the Roundtable discussion was the emphasis on truth, transparency, and relationships. Send a press release to a reporter with misinformation, and you can kiss that relationship goodbye. Also, you could wind up getting blasted in the blogosphere or somewhere else, and the negative implications of that could be extremely harmful. As a company, we’ve got to continually get our name out there to generate awareness, but it has to be done with these ethical and sensible principles in mind. Once you’ve got that in place, hit every possible channel you can. Technorati : journalism, public relations, reno public relations, social media

Steve Rubel has a good collection of 35 ways to use RSS today. Take a look. Some of my favorites are:

• Track Drunk Athletes
• Read the notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci one data at a time
• Track the latest uses for rss

Technorati : RSS
Del.icio.us : RSS

Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with Dean Cole Campbell of the Reynolds School of Journalism for the University of Nevada, Reno (of which I am an alumni). He was accompanied by Howard Goldbaum and Larry Dailey. They discussed how they are equipping students with the tools necessary to compete in a job market where online media is part of the job. They have some exciting things planned around their graduate program and wanted to discuss how Twelve Horses (my employer) might help or participate. It was great to hear how my alma mater is doing and get the opportunity to geek out a little about new and emerging technologies.

I hope I have exciting updates in the future about how Twelve Horses and the Reynolds School of Journalism can or will work together on various projects.

Technorati : College, Journalism, University of Nevada, Web 2.0