2005 August

Yesterday evening, Brady Forrest from Microsoft Search informed me and the other Search Champs via email that the new MSN Search engine is now capable of searching in full within RSS and Atom feeds.
Here is the communication he sent out:

With the growing popularity of podcasting, publishers and marketers around the world are asking themselves how to monetize this content channel. In this article, we’re taking a look at the various indirect monetization opportunities made possible by podcasting for marketers, especially through improved and more personal marketing communications.

After publishing the review of RSS Feeds Submit yesterday, the vendor of RSS Submit stepped forward and provided some of his own commentary on their new competitor, which does put a different light on RSS Feeds Submit.

This week Robin Good’s new media picks selection includes:

RSS by email feed forwarding service
RSS ad management and tracking service
RSS reader focuses on news aggregation
Blogs to MP3 audio converter
Podcast RSS feed creator from text blog entries
Turn any RSS feed into a podcast
Online music clearinghouse for independent artists
DRM-free legal […]

For most marketers online e-mail is still the key marketing and communicational tool, but getting your messages through is getting increasingly difficult. Since it’s clear that even though RSS has 100% delivery ratios, it’s really not a replacement for e-mail, the question remains how can RSS and e-mail be used together to generate the best possible results for your marketing?

In terms of generating traffic, what good is an RSS feed if no one can find it, right? Part of promoting your feeds and using them to generate traffic is of course submitting the feeds to appropriate search engines and directories, quite a tedious process if you’re doing it by hand, given the large number of directories and engines out there. There’s now a new tool that will help you do this automatically. See how it compares with one of its key competitors, which we already reviewed here.

According to Nooked, 87% of influencers are in fact using RSS to keep up with news and other information. With the low or even nonexisting investment for providing your own feeds, having an RSS strategy really should no longer be a question.

Since yesterday, companies using SalesForce.com, one of the most popular CRM solutions on the market, can now integrate their SalesForce.com account with Spanning Salesforce 2.0, a free tool that allows them to subscribe to information from their Salesforce.com account via RSS.

RSS can in fact be used to capture data and registered users, but there are right approaches and wrong approaches to do doing so, especially if you want to generate maximum impact from your feeds. We’ll examine the AdAge.com example and where they went wrong, and then provide other alternatives.

According to the latest research from Nielsen/NetRatings, only 11% of blog readers are using RSS for content consumption, with nearly 5% of those using desktop aggregators and more than 6% using web-services such as MyYahoo!

There is a new search engine on the block! Well there is nothing new with starting a search engine, there are thousands out there today. Well this one searches RSS feeds! Okay, so that narrows it down some. This one also searches podcasts! Okay, now you have my attention.

A new, outstandingly designed podcasting player, search tool and aggregator has just launched. Called the Ziepod, it offers unmatched ease of use, features and ergonomics to make it anyone’s best Windows candidate as the next podcasting player of choice.
The Ziepod is indeed a little jewel of UI and usability design, conceived and created with the […]

On the RSS enterprise front there is a lot going on that is not readily apparent yet. A number of companies are readying new products and services which should an order of magnitude better than the RSS newsmastering tools we have seen so far. Also the press and analysts are upping their antes to find […]

The issue of what is right and best to do when it comes to republish content or even just headlines coming from a public RSS feed is now spreading to the growing number of independent online publishers taking advantage of RSS powerful syndication and real-time news provision opportunities.
I have myself challenged publicly at least one […]

Seems to be a mighty storm brewin’ - a bit more powerful than a Nor’easter, too. Been a long time comin’. It’s RSS, it’s feeds, it’s XML - it’s all of the above. As an ex-English major, I’m torn. Does “Atom” really mean RSS? Does RDF really equal RSS 1.0? How many licks does it […]

New media picks of the week is my weekly basket of tasty resources, tools and services.
These are this week little gems that I have run into, have accidentally discovered or been pointed to or have read about in articles, RSS feeds and newsletters I subscribe to.
Try for yourself, download, install and learn some […]

If you are thinking about making your own podcast show available on the Internet, you may want to consider hiring some quality voice talent to create your show opening and closing audio titles, or more importantly to professionally dub your advertisers and sponsors messages.
As much as it is true that podcasting, like video-blogging and blogs […]

If you hadn’t taken seriously my previous post about Google finally moving to fully adopt and support RSS, now you have final proof that the most popular search engine has indeed understood the limitations of supporting Atom feeds only and has finally made available its all of its Web and News content as full RSS […]

Even after all that’s been written and explained, even reputable online marketing publications such as ClickZ.com still don’t get RSS metrics. Where did they go wrong and what marketers can really do with RSS metrics?

I spent some more time with FeedDigest, the tool that helps you display syndicated content on your sites and mix multiple feeds together, and discovered it actually offers much more under the hood than I first anticipated. All in all, a great RSS radar tool. Do we have a market leader in this category here?