Archive for the ‘RSS’ Category
Jun
5
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
Posted in RSS, Social
Nov
30
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.
Posted in Marketing, RSS
Nov
9
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
Posted in RSS
Sep
20
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.
Posted in Blog, Geeky Stuff, RSS
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.
