By Rok Hrastnik (c) 2005

The RSS promise for end-users is simple:
–> a unified one-stop-shop to consume online content, without having to visit dozens of sites every day to see what’s new and without having their online subscriptions interfere with their personal and business e-mail communications;

–> complete control over their content consumption, including a quick, easy and reliable mechanism to unsubscribe from content they do not wish to receive;

–> the ability to receive breaking news as it becomes available, without having to wait for a monthly, weekly or daily recap sent to their e-mail addresses;

–> the certainty of actually receiving the content they want, without the fear of it being stopped by sp@m filters on the way;

–> the ability to receive rich-media content directly to their desktops, including audio and video content;

–> the promise of providing the tools to make their lives easier, including receiving critical content updates as soon as they become available.

These points are not simple enhancements, but important advancements that can fundamentally change how internet content is consumed. Furthermore, these points themselves prove why marketers need to start implementing RSS today!

To bring the point home, let us inspect some of the content services already powered by RSS.

Library Elf : Making The Library Experience Easier

Library Elf helps you keep track of your library accountsin one place and received reminders, such as what library material is due, overdue and ready for pickup. Library Elf uses the power of RSS to help you forget about your library accounts and instead be directly notified of the changes you’re waiting for, directly to your desktop.

Indeed : Helping You Find The Right Job

Indeed.com provides its visitors with job seeking results from hundreds of sites and then makes the search results accessible via RSS feeds. Users can subscribe to individual search results, pertaining directly to their search keywords to be notified immediately new jobs are available.

Flickr : Sharing Your Life In Picture

Flickr is the most popular photography management and sharing service on the web, enabling end-users to upload their photos and then make them available to their friends, associates and family through a wide assortment of content delivery channels, including RSS. By subscribing to individual Flickr feeds from their users, everyone can have direct access to the latest life experiences from their friends.

RSSCalendar : Sharing Your Events

rssCalendar.com allows individuals and companies to share their personal or group calendars with the rest of the world, letting everyone that matters know of where and what they are doing next, delivering this information via individual RSS feeds.

Coupons.com : Savings To Your Desktop

Coupons.com brings the best deals and coupons to internet end-users, helping them save monëy by discounted shopping. As of late, they also started delivering coupons through RSS feeds, giving their subscribers direct access to their latest offerings.

PubSub.com : Tracking The World

PubSub.com is an amazing service that allows you to track practically everything going on around the world by matching your keywords with tens of thousands of online content sources, and enabling you to subscribe to your customized search results through customized RSS feeds.

RSSAuction.com : Tracking Your Purchase Interests

If you’re a regular eBay user, you certainly want to keep track of new products available, which precisely match your interests. rssAuction.com helps users keep better track of eBay by giving them a tool to first create a comprehensive list of product requirements and then delivering the search result through an RSS feed. As soon as new products matching individual interests appear, the user is notified of that through his RSS aggregator, giving him the ability to start bidding immediately and without having to visit eBay every day to find the right products.

Upcoming.org : Keeping Track Of Local And Social Events

>From the Upcoming.org website: “Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you’re attending, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your own weblog. As Upcoming.org learns more about the events you enjoy, it will suggest new events you never would have heard about.”

FeedBeep : The Ultimate “Time-To-Information” Tool

Depending on who you are and your current life situation, many content alerts are critical for you. If you’re looking for a job, you want to know immediately when a new one matching your precise interests is available, and so on. While RSS brings this information to your desktop, that might not be fast enough. Feedbeep.com takes internet content delivery one step further, by empowering users to have their critical content updates delivered from an RSS feed directly to their mobile phones via SMS.

RSS Empowers Consumers

The one thing all of these RSS-based or RSS-empowered services have in common is that they empower consumers.

They empower them by getting the content that matters to them delivered directly to their desktops or online content aggregators, but still giving them the power to unsubscribe within moments of not being satisfied with the content they are receiving.

Even more so, these services empower consumers to create social networks and easily share their information with their friends, family and associates on a large scale.

About The Author
Rok Hrastnik is the author of Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS, acclaimed as the best and most comprehensive guide to RSS for marketers by leading RSS experts. The complete guide on RSS for marketers: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/index.html?src=sa11

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By Trevor Bauknight

Late last week at Seattle’s Gnomedex technology conference, a cutting-edge exploration of emerging Internet technologies like RSS, Blogging and Podcasting, Microsoft demonstrated IE7 publicly for the first and announced that the company was in love with RSS. Not in so many words, of course, but Microsoft is embracing and extending the open syndication technology in a way not seen previously.

For starters, IE7 will have nice RSS integration built right in to the browser. RSS feed autodiscovery will light up a button on the toolbar inviting users to subscribe to a site’s content. This is a nice touch, following the lead of Opera and Apple’s Safari in making it less of a chore to track down and subscribe to RSS feeds.

Next, the forthcoming and long-awaited followup to Windows XP, code-named Longhorn, will feature RSS-related “platform services”, integrating RSS functionality right at the OS level. What this means, concretely, is that those who create applications that make use of RSS can count on a certain level of OS-level functionality including automatic downloading and parsing of feeds. The jury is still out on what this could mean; and although there is the predictable speculation on how Microsoft will use this to put its competitors at a disadvantage, the company seems to have provided a means for application writers to make use of non-Microsoft-approved RSS elements while still gaining some of the benefits of OS-level parsing and idle-time feed downloading.

Finally, Microsoft has created what it calls Simple List Extensions to the RSS model, allowing content to be provided in the form of an ordered list, such as a constantly-updating top-ten lists, calendar entries and so on. In a refreshing move, the company will be making these extensions freely available using a Creative Commons license, a way of making content freely available while retaining certain rights to that content.

What Is RSS?

In the event that you live in a cave and still don’t know about RSS, it is a sub-standard of XML that allows content providers to easily syndicate their content in a predictable way, enabling programmers to create programs (commonly called “aggregators”) that pull in wide-ranging content one item at a time and present it in a logical manner. Think of it as a subscription model for capsule summaries of all the web content you don’t have time to read, similar to AP headlines rolling in on a teletype. It allows you to collect web content from a variety of sources into one place where you can pick and choose what you’d like to actually visit.

Building on the concept, the Podcasting phenomenon feeds audio broadcasts in a similar manner using the same underlying technology. It is this kind of versatility that makes RSS such a prime candidate for being the most significant disruptive technology since the arrival of HTML, meaning that it will acquire new uses not intended or foreseen in its original implementation. Blogs make heavy use of RSS feeds to present bits of news from other sites automatically, and so on.

In fact, Microsoft seems to be betting that RSS will once again shift the primary model by which people make use of the Web. Originally, linking was key, and people moved from site to site through a comparatively simple web of interconnections until there were simply too many pages to keep track of. Then came the search engines to help you find what you were looking for on the Web, and now Google has become a common verb. Searching is the primary way people find Web content today; but Microsoft sees this changing again as RSS makes it possible for people to subscribe to content they know they like or find useful.

I’ll nevër forget my first experience with the World Wide Web, and I don’t recall being all that excited about the text-based subject tree with some interesting entries but no content. That was fifteen years ago, however, and the Web has changed pretty dramatically since then. There is still a good deal of magic in the basic hyperlink, though the sheer amount of garbage on the Web has made the kind of discovery we used to enjoy nearly impossible. In fact, in spite of technological advances in the search engines, results are still hit-and-miss at best, and downright useless at worst.

Two Ways Forward From Here

RSS has been touted as a sort of “back-door” into the coveted highly-placed search results of Yahoo and perhaps into Google, thanks to the automated technology of “pinging” systems which spread the word about your RSS feed’s new content, the return-links they generate and the fact that most sites with RSS feeds are content-driven to begin with. We can say that since we established our RSS feed at CafeID, our traffïc from searches has picked up dramatically, and we’re nothing but pleased with the result of a couple of hours’ effort.

Google, however, is exploring a different technology it invented called SiteMaps, which are similar to RSS feeds except that they feed your content to Google, rather than to the world of RSS aggregators, thereby (it is hoped) improving the accuracy of its search results. We’ll explore SiteMaps a little further next week, after we get our own SiteMap up and running.

Microsoft’s embrace of the RSS model is hard to dismiss, especially given the enthusiasm and openness that the company seems to be bringing to the project. A public beta release of IE7 is due out sometime this summer, showcasing this technology, and when Longhorn arrives next year sometime, the idea that our content will be flowed automatically through the OS and a wide range of associated applications is very appealing.

Okay! I’m Convinced Already! What Do I Do?

Creating an RSS feed couldn’t be much easier. You simply create a simple XML file describing the content you wish to syndicate and place it somewhere on your site. The file, a simple text file, uses straightforward self-explanatory tags like title and link to describe each you want to syndicate (this article would be a new item, for example) and then set about keeping your sites up to date.

You don’t need to run a blog or anything like that to have an RSS feed. Just find a good tutorial like this one at SearchEngineWatch and make your file, then validate it and expose it to the monitoring (or “ping” sites) that keep track of and pass the word about your content feed.

It’s ridiculously easy to add an RSS feed to your website, whether yours is a content-driven site or not; and with the syndication format about to take off, it makes perfect sense to investigate embracing it yourself for your company’s website if you haven’t already.

A vote of confidence from Redmond goes a long way toward establishing technology like this. Subscription models seem to be very popular at Microsoft these days, and it will be interesting to watch how Gates & Co. handle the integration of RSS technology into its product line. Watch this space, or better yet, subscribe to it for continued coverage of emerging Internet technologies and how to put them to work for you.

About The Author
Trevor Bauknight is a web designer and writer with over 15 years of experience on the Internet. He specializes in the creation and maintenance of business and personal identity online and can be reached at trevor@tryid.com. Stop by CafeID.com for a frëe tryout of the revolutionary SiteBuildingSystem and look over our Flash-based website and IMAP e-mail hostïng solutions, complete with live support.

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www.creative-mouse.com specializes in website design. We have helped hundreds of clients with their online goals since 1994.