2005 March

Since we’re talking about practical “everyday” RSS uses, here’s another breakthrough, this time from Bloglines …
Starting today, people can track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world’s largest parcel shipping companies-FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service-within their Bloglines MyFeeds page. Package tracking in Bloglines encompasses international shipments, in English. [...]

Practical RSS applications are certainly growing, fulfilling the promise of RSS becoming a tool to make our lives easier. Indeed is another of those, providing their visitors with job seeking results from hundreds of sites.

Shel Holtz shares that the Amsterdam-based ING Groep got the early lead in using RSS for internal communications when it launched a pilot test with 200 employees early this year.

Now this is more like it! A free news aggie with keyword alerts! That is just the reason that I am so bent on using Feed Demon when I’m on my Windows desktop. To me, having CITA RSS Aggregator offering this as a free feature places it pretty high on my personal list of good [...]

Cool! A program that will help you whip-up some RSS feeds for your own use without any real skill needed. Awesome interface, great options and most importantly it is really easy to use. Check out FeedSpring for yourself! If you do use this software for feed creation though, consider dropping a couple of dollars [...]

I interviewed John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing to get the “how-to” on corporate blogging and referral marketing. The interview reveals excellent pointers on how to integrate business blogging in your business strategy, the differences between the buying patterns of e-mail and RSS subscribers, and a complete referral marketing system.

The “#1 Mistake Most Blogs Do” article generated quite some interesting feedback from the blogosphere. What especially strikes me is that somewhere along the line we started comparing apples and oranges, and lost some much needed objectivity. Let’s take a closer look at the relations between blogs, e-zines, RSS and e-mail.

This might sound strange coming from me, but the #1 mistake most blogs are doing is not publishing their content via e-mail, as a supplement to RSS.

FeedBeep and PubSub just announced their partnership to deliver PubSub RSS alerts to mobile phones via RSS. And why not, since RSS to SMS in fact promises to improve our lives by giving us easy access to the time-critical information we need most, when we need it.

Nasdaq reports that RocketInfo, a leading news aggregator/serach engine has just struck a deal with Kanoodle to monetize its RSS feeds with targeted RSS advertising.

Even though this is from a week or so back, it is still good news regardless. According to Yahoo! News, BigHip is offering more than just email marketing. It seems that they have decided to offer RSS abilities as well. Right on! Another marketing company finally gets it!

According to a new survey by Slashdot, RSS usage is about to grow dramatically.

We interviewed Scott Rafer of Feedster to get the scoop on the future and present of RSS advertising, RSS metrics and RSS consumption habits. Scott provides unique content and insights of great use and advantage to all advertisers and RSS marketers.

The latest JupiterResearch report claims that RSS will not have a significant effect as a supplemental alternative to e-mail marketing. While the report does serve some relevant obstacles to wide-spread marketing adoption of RSS, it mostly shows a poor understanding of RSS by marketers. Actually, as you can see from this article, many of the points made in the report are invalid …

Yakov Shafranovich has written a great article at XML.com about tracking packages with RSS.
“Now imagine if you were buying things from eBay, or doing your holiday shopping at Amazon: you might be expecting multiple or urgent packages, and I can bet that most of us will be tracking them pretty often, just like those favorite websites [...]

Bloglines is not the only way to keep up on your content when you are on the go. Another service that is worth checking out is called Feed Tagger. Now, I have not had the opportunity to try this myself yet. But judging from I have been reading about it, I’d definitely say that [...]

If you needed a sign that blogs are becoming more and more “legitimate” sources for news, last week mediabistro’s FishBowlDC became the first blog with a White House press pass.
It’s interesting to visit FishBowlDC and read the posts from the past week. The posts detail the effort involved in getting the press pass, the [...]

SearchEngineWatch reports that Feedbeep, a new service that sends you an SMS alert when new RSS headlines are available, just entered beta, which anyone within the U.S. and Belgium can join.

MSN just started testing their own standalone web-based RSS aggregator, in addition to the already existing RSS functionality within the main MSN portal.

One of the recent players to enter the branded RSS aggregator market, Custom Reader, just launched the beta version of their branded desktop aggregator, and gave me a shot at doing my own branded edition. Read more to see how a branded aggregator looks in action.