2005 September

We already covered how e-mail and RSS can work together, but in this article we are getting in to the how-to specifics of how to publish an e-zine via RSS.

The true power of RSS for end-users, in direct relation to marketing, is getting precisely the content you want, carefully adjusted to your needs, at exactly the right time. For marketers, this means delivering highly relevant information that directly addresses the needs of their audiences.

Attensa, the Outlook RSS Reader, just made one more step towards what might become the future of RSS Readers, mainly taking them beyond “simple” feed aggregation towards more complex social networking features.

Here is my new media picks selection for this week. Check out what I have found:

Cross-platform File Sharing and Synchronization
Online collaboration across email, calendaring and contacts
Recording tool captures any video playing on your screen
Graphic visualization of delicious contents
RSS one-stop reference
Personal Publishing and CMS service
Multimedia search engine
Social bookmarking site
[…]

In the second part of the podcast marketing interview, we ask Rodney two key questions marketers are most interested in, real-life success stories and recommended best pratices.

In yet another batch of RSS research, Nielsen/NetRatings reports that RSS users are significantly more engaged in online news than non-users, visiting an average of 10.6 news sites compared with 3.4 news sites for non-users.

RSS is certainly still far from being user-friendly, which is especially evident once you try and left-click on an RSS subscribe button. If you don’t want to waste potential subscribers, what other alternatives do you have? And what are the best ways of generating RSS feed subscribers?

With marketing slowly transforming from a clear “push” to a “semi-pull” model, one has to wonder how direct marketing will need to evolve to survive on the long-term. In this article, we take a look at some of the possibilities, especially in relation to RSS.

Google has just made available its new blog search engine, becoming the first major search engine to offer full-blown blog and feed search capabilities.
“While Google web search has allowed you to limit results to popular blog file types such as RSS and XML in web search results for some time, and its news search […]

We interviewed Rodney Rumford of PodBlaze.com to get first-hand information on how marketers really can use podcasting to increase their marketing and overall business results.

Truth be told, most blogs aren’t really optimized for marketing effectiveness. Even more so, some blogs are absolute marketing machines, but they at the same time fail to fully capitalize on that fact by not being really optimized marketing-wise. Read this article to discover the 13 essential points to optimizing your blog …

This is certainly breakthrough news. Outlook Express in Windows Vista, the next operating system from Microsoft, will also feature RSS reader functionality.

The RSS vendors space defined, with some of the key players in each field noted.

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

Open-source server-based RSS feed aggregator
RSS newsmastering tool self-discovers hot topics
Blogging to the Web from within Microsoft Word
Free online content storehouse (1GB) and sharing platform
Web site traffic ranking and popularity reporting service
Web search via SMS
Multilingual web search interface
Usability testing community platform
[…]

Forrester Research recently released the final version of their report, claiming that only 2% of American households online use RSS. And naturally, these numbers are far apart from much of the other research statistics available on the market. For marketers, the situation is nearning the unacceptable phase, with no one really knowing how adopted RSS really is. NewsGator and FeedDemon, Yahoo!, Pluck, Attensa, Bloglines, FireFox, Pheedo, Nooked, Syndicate IQ and others … please save us of our misery –> start providing some real-life numbers on how many people are really using RSS.

eWeek.com and internetnews.com report that RSS just became more secure and thus more appropriate for wider enterprise use. The first marketing applications are just around the corner.

This news comes at great pleasure for me and all marketers trying to establish a presence in one of the largest markets in the world, Russia. Word just got out that their key search engine and portal now also offers RSS aggregation to its users.

This week my new media picks include:

Customize content into marketable products
RSS submission tools compared
RSS output for Macromedia Dreamweaver
Blog geo-coding service
Podcast music network supporting indie bands
Online guide to understanding Digital Rights Management
The future of music
Earth interactive mapping service
Earth satellite visualization
Magazine cover creator
PHP forum software does […]