The RSS Advantage

I’ve just read an impassioned blog posting from Matt Ambrose about what RSS needs to do to reach the ‘tipping point’. In it Matt brings up some valid points. I posted my comments on his blog so I will not go into them here. One of the points that he brought up is the lack of awareness by the general public about RSS. I will admit that I couldn’t see the advantages of RSS until I actually started using it earlier on this year; today it has become an indispensable tool in my everyday life.

I have been ‘aware’ of RSS since 2004 so why did I wait until this year to look into it. Well first of all the acronym put me off! Three letter acronyms are rife in the Information Technology business. Talk to any techie and immediately he’ll start spouting off his little acronyms (HTML, XML, CRM, ERM, ERP, BI….. zzzzzz …. zzzz….) See what I mean? Just the use of the acronym implied complexity (and I am a tech guy). Consider the MP3 acronym. How many people do you know walk around and say, “Hey, checkout my new MP3 player!”? Very few, but you will hear them saying, “Hey, checkout this brand new iPod!” A further enforcement of this principle is the term “Podcasting”

The tipping point for RSS will come when one newsreader becomes prevalent and so popular that RSS will become synonymous with that newsreader application. Like Kleenex is to tissue paper, Hoover is to vacuum cleaner and more recently Google is to Internet search.

I can’t wait until that day, so what can we do to move it forward?

Technorati Tags: RSS Promotion

Yesterday I mentioned the five advantages of RSS for end users. Today I’d like to cover three advantages of publishing RSS feeds on your website

1. Website Traffic Increase

Your traffic will increase because your visitors will not forget to come back to your site - your RSS feed and their RSS reader notifies them whenever you have new content. Your RSS feed adds value to your visitors and saves them time. You also gain the traffic boost from ‘lazy’ webmasters that are syndicating your RSS feed and displaying it on their sites.

2. Search Engine Optimization

RSS is a great strategy for getting incoming links to your website. You can do this by offering copy and paste code of your feed to make it easy for webmasters to syndicate your content. Note: This only applies to feeds that have been implemented as HTML and not JavaScript (which, at the time of writing, search engines don’t read). This technique will help you get your feed syndicated on more websites and provide you with those much-appreciated one-way incoming links. To make the links more effective you can place your chosen keywords in the title of your syndicated articles.

3. Improved Site Stickiness

Yes, the old term from the 90’s is back. RSS improves your site’s stickiness and lures your visitors to return and read your content - provided of course that you provide quality content. Without an RSS feed your visitors have no way of knowing when there is new content available and they will forget to return regularly.

It really ticks me off when people who don’t understand what they are talking about try to promote themselves as egg-spurts (experts)! Especially when they claim that RSS is a broadcasting or push medium. Here is what the word ‘broadcast‘ means according to dictionary.com:

1. to transmit (programs) from a radio or television station.
3. to cast or scatter abroad over an area, as seed in sowing.
4. to spread widely; disseminate: She broadcast the good news all over town.

According to my understanding (disclaimer: if I am mistaken, I am always ready to be corrected): Broadcasting involves someone or something transmitting a message.

Now can someone please explain to me, “How the (insert favorite expletive here) does a web server transmit a message?” Unless there is some new technology available out there that I am not aware of there is NO WAY that your web server transmits or pushes your RSS feed to your subscribers.

Here’s the truth: Your RSS feed is ‘pulled‘ off your web server by the subscriber’s RSS reader.
Sorry about the ranting, but I just had to get that off my chest.

Technorati Tags: RSS Broadcasting

How would you like to forget about scrambling through your email InBox filtering out spam and looking for news messages? How would you like to have news from your favorite hobby site delivered to your desktop? These are just two of the problems that RSS solves, here are the rest:

1. RSS Delivers the latest news to your desktop
   RSS helps you stay in touch with the huge amount of information available on the Internet. Your RSS reader contacts every one of your favorite websites and retrieves the latest news for you. Depending on which RSS reader you use, it can sort and filter your news as well. You don’t have to go get the news anymore, it comes to you! Whether it is about the weather, new music, software upgrade, local news, or a new posting from a rarely-updated site, you learn about it as soon as it comes out.
2. RSS saves you time
   You no longer need to surf through each and every one of your favorite websites, blogs or news sites to find out what is new. You also don’t need to scan through all 500 of your bookmarks and check if there is perhaps a site you haven’t visited recently. With RSS and depending on the RSS reader you have, you can subscribe to a website’s RSS feed at the click of a button.
3. RSS puts you in complete control of the news your receive
   You select the content that you want, when you want it and the way you want it. You get to look at it when you want to too. An RSS feed enables website owners to put the right information into your hands. You are completely free to choose which websites to subscribe to with your RSS reader.
4. RSS give you instant unsubscribe
   If you don’t want to receive information from an RSS feed publisher anymore you can just hit the delete button in your RSS reader and, “Wham! That feed is history.” You don’t need to confirm or notify anyone that you don’t want to receive their information anymore like you need to with email.
5. RSS allows you complete anonymity and is 100% SPAM-free
   You do not have to send anyone any personal information to subscribe to their public RSS feed. And because you haven’t provided anyone any information you don’t have to worry about what may happen if you unsubscribe from an RSS feed. With RSS you can free up your email’s InBox and receive your news through RSS.