2005 April

”RSS is Santa Claus content, delivered to you by the postal carrier, via your own personal remote control ordering system.”

The Syndicate conference, focusing on the strategic aspects of RSS for the corporate world, is just around the corner. I’m speaking there as well, so I’ll be spending a couple of days in New York this May. Also, we’ll hopefully be able to finally present some aggregate metrics on the marketing effectiveness of RSS at the conference …

Byte Scout just released the 2nd edition of their Feed Scout RSS Reader. Feed Scout is actually an IE toolbar-based reader, meaning that it integrates with your Internet Explorer, giving you access to your RSS feeds directly from your browser. One of the more notable features is certainly the filtering capability, the first step to a more controlled content consumption experience.

Google AdSense ads started appearin in RSS feeds, making this one of the most interesting RSS advertising developments of 2005. The implications of this are amazing and could impact the entire RSS world.

It’s an on-line RSS Dashboard, in English, German and Dutch: 24 eyes. The good news: it can import from OPML-lists and you can add tags to the newsitems, making RSS into social software! The bad news: it only work in MS Internet Explorer.

Blogsites are complex blog implementations with the power of turning your site in to the preferred content source for your industry, as well as generating high search engine rankings for you. This audio interview focuses on the mechanics of blogsites, RSS radars, using RSS for increased search engine rankings and more …

It seems Google Gmail is rolling-out some basic RSS reading capabilities, according to some early users. Surprisingly, it seems the new RSS features are not at all satisfactionary. But the opportunities for Google certainly are here. Take a look at some “suggestions” …

FeedForAll.com just started beta testing the Mac edition of their desktop RSS creation tool. Beta testers naturally wanted …

Ping-O-Matic has been online exactly one year, and their stats from the last 365 days will make your jaw drop. According to the Ping-O-Matic website, they have pinged nearly 100,000,000 times and are sending pings at about the rate of 1,000,000 a day. In fact, the two founders of the service Dougal Campbell and […]

BusinessWeek says RSS is turning the Web on its head, with the prospect of people rather waiting for content to appear in their aggregators than to go “fetch” it on websites. But it’s not that simple, especially because people will overload themselves with RSS content.

I just wanted to let you know that we struck a deal with internet marketing expert Tinu Abayomi-Paul to offer you two of her best marketing guides as a bonus with your order of “Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS”.

In our recent interview Scott Rafer made it clear that Feedster is basing their business model on ad sales. As a search engine / content aggregator / reader they certainly have many ad opportunities, many of which Scott already indicated in the interview. It so doesn’t come as a shock that Feedster just partnered with AdBrite to, in their own words, “offer [a] robust ad marketplace for blogs”.

Have you ever thought of using RSS to rotate banners for your sites? Or displaying homes for sale using the enclosure tag? Or for using RSS to distribute proposals? Sharon Housely of FeedForAll reveals exactly these kind of case studies and some more unique RSS uses for marketers …

Character blogs are starting to generate interesting feedback within the blogosphere, getting people on either the positive or the negative side of the fence. This “essay” was written to demonstrate the enormeous potential of character blogs with the purpose of extending the brand, and to argue why “authentic” may not really be “authentic” to many consumers looking for entertainment.

MarketingStudies.net just published a new free report covering key business and marketing aspects of RSS, titled The Business Case for RSS.

Evan Williams notes that Gmail has added feed reading to its growing list of features.
Since I haven’t seen anyone posting about this, I suppose I will. I’m guessing not many people have it yet, but there’s a new feature in Gmail called Web Clips, which displays little headlines above your inbox or message and is […]

Steve Rubel argues on WebProNews that RSS just might not be the next big thing, although he wishes otherwise. Is he right? Let’s see if my comments convince you otherwise …

Unlike most directories out there, Feed24 is based around the feeds themselves and really could careless if there was any actual Website attached to the content be and feed being presented. Check it out!

RSS and blogs can in fact be used as powerful relationship marketing tools, as explained in this interview by the guerrilla marketer and author Roger C. Parker.

I just got word of the ClickBank Product Feeds service, which takes the ClickBank.com product database and turns it in to an RSS feed. The cool catch is that the service adds your ClickBank affiliate name in to the product links so that every time someone clicks-through and buys you receive the sales commission.