I received a LinkedIn request this week seeking an RSS consultant. Interesting...and from a relatively large company to boot.

Is this a trend? Anyone else seeing requests like this? I thought blogging hit the mainstream when we were able to extract revenue from Blog Consulting. Is RSS now seeing a similar revenue opportunity for consultants?

We just put the finishing touches on the latest research to come from the Pheedo Labs. We've done a deep dive into the automotive category, one of the strongest categories in the network, to show advertisers, and publishers, the strength of RSS advertising & marketing.

Executive Summary
The Pheed Read is back, and this time out we’re taking a different approach to our data. In Pheed Read #3, we discussed the issue of full text feeds vs. summary feeds and observed user behavior on clicking through from feeds to websites. Full and summary feeds garnered basically the same click through rates, and 90% percent of readers consumed feed content within their RSS aggregators regardless of the length of the feed item – conclusion being, RSS users are not visiting websites often, and should be marketed to at the feed level.

This time out, in Pheed Read #4, we will be analyzing the data from a specific Pheedo content channel – the automotive category. RSS is emerging as one of the most targeted online mediums for advertisers and the analysis of a single category demonstrates that each content category and its associated readership are different, and marketing strategies should be customized to reach the intended audience. On to the numbers and analysis.

Key Pheed Read Findings Include:

• Feed reader market share statistics show drastic differences from other categories
• Headline-only feeds garner twice the CTR of summary feeds
• Auto category shows high rate of growth month over month and in Q4 of 2006, outpacing all other feed categories
• Most auto publishers offer headline and summary feeds
• Auto-enthusiasts are a financially diverse group
• More than three-quarters of auto category consumers are over the age of 35

Read the entire Pheed Read and get more insight on where RSS & Automotive are headed.

Hello everyone,

If you're in San Francisco next week for the DMA06, there's another RSS Roundtable Dinner coming up, sponsored by Pheedo, SilverPop and SimpleFeed.

The fourth RSS Roundtable, a forum that brings together RSS industry thought leaders to discuss the state of RSS marketing and publishing and the future of the technology, will be held in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 17, in conjunction with the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) Annual Conference and Exhibition. Lee Odden, president and founder of TopRank Online Marketing, will join a panel of experts including executives from Pheedo and event co-hosts PRWeb, SilverPop, and SimpleFeed.

The theme for the evening will be "dmRSS" - using RSS as a direct marketing tool. The conversation will focus on key issues driving business adoption of RSS and explore how direct marketers can use RSS to drive sales. The event will also serve as a vehicle for industry partners to discuss challenges and viable solutions and achieve a mutual understanding of goals and objectives for dmRSS.

Attendees will include individuals from within the RSS and marketing industries including RSS manufacturers, marketers, service providers, and end-users. The most recent RSS Roundtable was held in New York with over forty people in attendance. Past dinners were attended by firms including DoubleClick, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Topics to be discussed will include:

I'm going to be visiting the floor at <a href="http://www.ad-tech.com/chicago.asp">ad:tech in Chicago</a> on July 24th and 25th, and spending some time in Chicago for a couple of days. If you're in the Chicagoland area and want to meet up, please give me a shout or send an email!

dana at pheedo.com
920.569.6535

Nick Carson, in an article on InternetNews.com highlights a few things that publishers need to think about regarding their RSS feeds.

1. They need to look at better understanding the consumption of the feed.
2. Is it growing or declining?
3. Is the content being re-syndicated?
4. Is that feed showing up on other Web sites?
5. Are your feeds generating traffic back to your Web site?
6. Does your ad sales force know how to sell RSS ad inventory?
7. Do you know how much RSS ad inventory you have available?

Technorati Tags: RSS, Advertising, Pheedo

So, I just took the 2006 MarketingSherpa blog survey. What fun. It was great and humbling to see the company I was in. However, the survey was a pain in the ass, and here's why.

I've read nearly every english language blog in the survey at some point in their life, however, I might not have read them recently, and my memory is quite short.

Wouldn't it be great if for surveys like this, you could take the RSS feed from each of the blogs in question and on an AJAX survey page, click on a 'twistie' or dropdown to see the latest headlines from the blog to get some sort of refresher on their content and to better inform my decision on whether or not to vote.

That would be a great way to use RSS - powering surveys.

RSS could also be a trusted delivery mechanism for surveys for companies that run ongoing customer panels. For example, I just signed up to receive more information from Best Buy on doing their compensated customer surveys and panels. I would gladly subscribe to an RSS feed from them (lest the emails from them get caught in a spam filter) to ensure that I get all of the surveys they send my way. (I love Best Buy, by the way)

Steve Rubel has a great post on 35 great ways you can use RSS today, including a feed on even more things to do with RSS!

Technorati Tags: RSS

It's been a few months since the last Pheedo Pheed Read report! For those of you who've been watching, the RSS marketplace has grown and matured in just a few short months.

As usual, there's lots of data to share in this Pheed Read. We'll cover a few highlights here, but if you're interested in the full details, please download the Pheed Read Spring 2006 Report here.

Full-Text Feeds and Summary Feeds Garner Similar Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Summary feeds (full content not shown in the feed item) average at 12% CTR while full-text feeds average 10% CTR. The report states that the median CTR for full-text feeds remains at 10% while summary feeds drop to 8% CTR due to extremely high CTR rates in certain categories and individual feeds.

The RSS Guru, Rok Hrastnik, has put out an RSS marketing survey.

Check out his blog post here
Sign up here

Technorati Tags: RSS

Adotas is having a Day of RSS today. There's a number of feature articles featuring Pheedo and everyone else in the RSS space.

Check it out here.

Technorati Tags: RSS

Coinciding with Ad:Tech San Francisco April 26-28, the RSS Industry Night Roundtable II aims to assemble a group of the top thought leaders in the RSS industry to discuss key topics that challenge all of us in RSS Advertising. This group will span the disciplines of RSS advertising, RSS manufacture, RSS aggregators and readers, and RSS purveyors and luminaries.

The event is free and seating is limited to 40 people. The event is sponsored by iUpload, PRWeb and Pheedo.

The first RSS Roundtable dinner, brought together some of the pioneers in RSS marketing and services including, Yahoo!, Microsoft, eBay, NewsGator, Simplefeed, Pubsub, Feedburner, Pheedo and Forrester.

The intent of this meeting is to discuss a number of key issues facing our industry and it's chances for continued success. This meeting will also serve as a vehicle for our key industry partners to discuss mutual challenges and viable solutions, as well as come to a mutual understanding of goals and objectives that we all have for the RSS advertising space. Lastly, we will have an opportunity to collaborate, as leaders in the industry, on how we can increase the rate of RSS adoption among information consumers. Case studies on RSS advertising success will also be presented. Attendees will also be encouraged to share their stories.

Where: San Francisco, 10-15 minute walk from Moscone (location of Ad:Tech). Event location details will be sent to interested parties.
Time: 6:30PM - 9:30PM
Date: April 27 (second day of Ad:Tech)
Cost: Free dinner sponsored by iUpload, PRWeb, Pheedo, cash bar
RSVP:: Send an email to bill AT Pheedo.com with your name, email, telephone and company name/address

Topics:
There are so many topics that we can collectively address as an industry, however, it's critical that we focus on the important few that address issues of RSS growth and adoption.

We will focus on key industry issues that are preventing business adoption of RSS. Below are the high-level issues that we'll cover. At the end of the document are additional topics that can be discussed if there is additional time.

--> Lack of standardized RSS metrics
--> Lack of presentable case studies and best practices
--> IRSS mass syndication
--> Actual RSS penetration
--> Rich-media advertising

Attendees:
Ideally, the event will attract around 40 high level leaders from within the RSS and Advertising industries including the following disciplines.

RSS Manufacturer
RSS Advertising
RSS Readers
RSS Services
RSS Convergence
RSS Research

If you are interested in attending, please send an email to bill AT Pheedo.com with your name, email, telephone and company name/address.

How much is invested in RSS?
***

Technorati Tags: RSS+Investment

PRWeb™ Announces February is PRWeb Podcast Month

During the month of February, PRWeb editors will select up to five news releases a day with podcast-related news and upgrade them to the $200 distribution level free of charge.

PRWeb features two RSS feeds applicable to podcasts, including:
* Podcasting - Announce: http://www.prweb.com/rss2/podcastingannounce.xml
* Podcasting - Tools and Services: http://www.prweb.com/rss2/podcastingtools.xml

*Full disclosure: PRWeb is a parter of Pheedo, where I am employed.

Technorati Tags: podcast, PRWeb, puppy

Marketing Sherpa in love with RSS, thanks to "email postage"
***

Victory for Email: AOL Enhanced Whitelist to Stay
***

Attensa online is live and availalbe!
***

The US is WAY, WAY BEHIND Japan in mobile web usage

The NPD Group found that just 12% of US mobile phone users go online through their phones, significantly less than the 76% of users in Japan who are surfing the Web through their wireless handset.

Technorati Tags: email postage, mobile web, RSS

DIY Network recently launched a two-month internet-only marketing campaign designed to drive DIY Network tune-in via targeted impressions, and drive DIYNetwork.com clickthrough for relevant content.

They did everything online. Site-specific banners, ad networks, blog advertising, RSS advertising (no podcasting, though), contextual ads and paid search.

Not only did they do online marketing proud, they got results from their two-month effort to boot!

- 67.9 million impressions
- 580,000 clickthroughs
- 80 percent of site visitors were new to DIYnetwork.com
- Visitors viewed an average of seven pages
- Rich-media banners average interaction rate was around 10 percent
- CTR for paid search increased 183 percent during the campaign, reaching 4.25 percent

They were even so kind as to share a diagram of their success with iMediaConnection.

Source: DIY Networks via iMediaConnection

Technorati Tags: Advertising, DIY Network, Pheedo, RSS

Marqui, the blogging and communications company, in conjuction with FreeRange Communications, the mobile RSS company, have released a great whitepaper on RSS entitled "RSS Rx: How Marketers Can Make the Most of RSS Technology." The document is a quick read, at only 15 pages, but gives a really great overview of RSS for marketers in a conversational tone that is very much a Marqui thing. (I mean, really, look at their website and you'll see what I mean)

The document cites nearly every RSS study done to date, and highlights some of the prominent RSS purveyors throughout the document. (Full disclosure: Pheedo is mentioned in the document)

There is also a fair bit of prescriptive content on 'what do do next' with your new-found RSS knowledge, such as the following:

Marketers interested in incorporating RSS into their activities should first take a hard look at their Web site. What content does it have that can – and should be – distributed? For example, does your site have blogs, forums, press releases, product information, support information, email newsletters, audio presentations or whitepapers? If not, can any of these items be added?

Even companies relying on third-parties to manage some of these items might be surprised to find that adding an RSS feed is an option. For instance, companies using a newsletter service to manage their newsletters should ask if the service comes with RSS feeds since more and more services are adding this capability.

Marqui has made the whitepaper available for download on their site in the downloads section.

Technorati Tags: Marqui, Pheedo, Freerange communications, RSS, whitepaper

Bill Flitter posted a great summary of the year in RSS activities over at his ReveNews blog. Full links to each of he events can be found in Bill's original post.

A few highlights:

1/10 – CNBC presents an introduction to RSS segment on Closing Bell. Welcome Wall Street!

1/12 – John Robb presents the idea of a Global RSS Subscription Repository to make subscribing to RSS a universal function that eliminates automatic subscription buttons from large vendors.

1/18 – Rok Hrastnik releases the most comprehensive electronic book on RSS.

2/23 – The Associated Press begins to deliver content via RSS feeds. Can you say mainstream?

4/3 – Feedburner gets second round VC funding.

4/28 – Dave Winer calls for RSS ads on a subscription basis.

6/24 – Microsoft announces that it will support RSS in Longhorn (now Vista) and Internet Explorer 7.

7/5 – The New York Times reports on the growth of RSS and the resulting RSS marketing opportunities.

9/27 – Forrester announces that 6% of consumers are using RSS, up from 2% in 2004.

10/2 – Feedburner announces partnership with Feedblitz to give publishers the capability to deliver content to readers via email.

10/7 – Google releases RSS aggregator: Google Reader.

10/10 – Yahoo releases whitepaper: RSS – Crossing Into the Mainstream. Key findings include:
• 12% of users are aware of RSS and 4% knowingly use it.
• 27% of internet users use RSS without knowing it.

12/4 – Target offers weekly ad via RSS.

12/12 – RSS Industry Night Roundtable, hosted by Rok Hrastnik, brings RSS industry leaders together to discuss the future of RSS.

12/14 – Pheedo releases second Pheed Read report.

12/15 – Microsoft announces use of orange RSS button in IE and Outlook.

Check out the rest of the RSS 2005 highlights here.

The SRI conference last week wasn't just about blogging. As such, there were several people there from the social networking space which I had the pleasure to meet. Ohad Jehassi, an HBS graduate and founder of friendsand.com, and online social networking and dating site, has combined the best of AOL style chat, locked pictures (amazing what you can learn from the adult industry) and a host of other features to make his dating/social networking service so unique. It's only been out a few months and there are already over 300,000 members.

I asked Ohad about where he thought RSS fit into the scheme of online dating. His site does not offer anything in the way of RSS. From what I gather from most folks, RSS has not yet permeated the online dating space in a big way at all.

The big idea here is that if I were looking for a certain type of person, I'd want an IRSS feed (individualized RSS) that feeds me custom results anytime someone that matchs my profile submits a new profile or updates a profile, or posts a video cast or podcast about themselves on the dating site.

We also talked at length about how the adult industry leads the way in many areas online. Perhaps that's what Hugh meant by Business Porn.

Amanda talks to random strangers about firefox vs. IE. Obviously, it's done in an urban location where there are enough folks to know the difference. Seriously, and nothing against Green Bay here, but if I did this at home, I'm betting that over half of anyone I acosted for an opinion would not have the slightest on what FireFox is. In fact, many are still using AOL.

Scoble gives a shout to the guys at Cognitive Daily who highlight a report on how mood affects your ability to remember and make word relationships. Bottom line on the study. If you're looking for creativity and ideas, check you mood!

I'm in Paris for LesBlogs 2.0 this week. Had a chance encounter with Mark Fletcher of Bloglines yesterday when we checked into the hotel at the same time. Went to the LesBlogs meetup last night and realized that I don't know too many European bloggers. (surprise...)
[Note to self: expand international blogging horizons]

Rok gives you 11 Reasons For Using RSS Marketing. As if you needed that many. I always think about RSS, but was thinking more after our presentation at SRI last week. Elaine O'Gorman of Silverpop hit home that RSS is a channel. When put in marketing terms - RSS is a marketing channel.

If you're coming to the Syndicate conference this December 12-14 in San Francisco and you work in the "RSS industry", we'd like to invite you to drop in for some lively discussion on the future of our industry.

In conjunction with the event, Pheedo is informally hosting an off-conference RSS Industry Night Roundtable, Rok Hrastnik will be moderating the evening as a neutral party. Essentially, we are aiming to focus the event on our industry and not on any company in particular.

Event Summary:
Coinciding with the RSS industry conference, Syndicate, the RSS Industry Night Roundtable aims to assemble a group of the top thought leaders in the RSS industry to discuss key topics that challenge all of us in this space. This group will span the disciplines of RSS advertising, RSS manufacture, RSS aggregators and readers, and RSS purveyors and luminaries.

The intent of this meeting is to discuss a number of key issues facing our industry and it's chances for continued success. This meeting will also serve as a vehicle for our key industry partners to discuss mutual challenges and viable solutions, as well as come to a mutual understanding of goals and objectives that we all have for the RSS space. Lastly, we will have an opportunity to collaborate, as leaders in the industry, on how we can increase the rate of RSS adoption among information consumers.

When:
Time: 6:30PM
Date: December 12th
Timing: In conjunction with the first day of Syndicate Conference on December 12th, 2005 in San Francisco.

Moderator:
Rok Hrastnik, a noted RSS authority and author of the book Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS has agreed to moderate the event as a neutral party.

Topics:
There are so many topics that we can collectively address as an industry, however, it's critical that we focus on the important few that address issues of RSS growth and adoption.

We will focus on key industry issues that are preventing business adoption of RSS. Below are the high-level issues that we'll cover on the 12th. At the end of the document are additional topics that can be discussed if there is additional time.

--> Lack of standardized RSS metrics
--> Lack of presentable case studies and best practices
--> IRSS mass syndication
--> Actual RSS penetration
--> Rich-media advertising

Attendees:
Ideally, the event will attract around 20 high level leaders from within the RSS industry from the following disciplines.

RSS Manufacture
RSS Advertising
RSS Readers
RSS Services
RSS Convergence
RSS Research

Participation:
If you wish to participate, please contact Rok Hrastnik as soon as possible for additional event information. The audience will be targeted to RSS service providers.

Bill Flitter of Pheedo has written 2 articles in a 3 part series on what you need to know about purchasing RSS advertising.

Check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

* Red Herring talks about it here

* ZD Net has something over here...

According to a BetaNews Interview with Google:

...and a full review of the Google Reader on the unofficialgoogleblog

RSS platform company NewsGator Technologies Inc. has acquired NetNewsWire, a news reader for the Mac OS X system. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

[via VentureWire]

Richard McManus of the Read/Write Web, has compiled a RSS Space chart that he's put into a Wiki. Happy to see that Pheedo's included. I think that he could use some more in-depth categories that would lend themselves to more of a 'competitive review, but it's a wiki, so I should probably just get on that and start contributing.

Pheedo has reviewed and responded to Google's RSS patent claim. If potential adopters want to know the degree to which RSS is a better mode of information distribution than former methods, one only has to look at the pregant pause of investment and legal interest in the medium.

Looking at the "5 stages of innovation decision", at least those according to Everett Rogers, we might likely be in the third state, the state of decision. From a corporate perspective, while I'm not where where the science is behind this, typical methods for bringing new products to market are usually marked by stages of investment of capital resources and pursuits of legal measures, when a company decides to adopt, rather than reject an innovation.

No sense in letting all this good data go to waste! We took a look under the hood and came up with a few interesting numbers on RSS readership.

Check our Pheed Read No. 1 here, or for the PR folks out there, you can check it out on MarketWIRE.

Hmm...this is encouraging. Looks like we have a LOT of education to do.

Released today from PEW.

Adrants posted this tidy little screenshot from a Flickr user who's none too happy about the seeminly irrelivent ads being pumped into the Washington Post Politics RSS feed. Frankly, I can't say that I blame them. From the "just because you can doesn't mean you should" category, we're seeing how just pumping irrelvent ads, even when they're part of the feed item (post, article, what have you), into feeds causes a rash on just about any self respecting feed consumer.

We've talked about this before, and we'll say it again. Ad pumping into a 'high-context' content rich environment is far from a good idea. Contextually relevant content-centric ads placed properly into feeds, either as standalone ads or as part of an item, are a far better bet than what we see here.

There are a couple of other things that are noteworthy in this discussion

Again, there's not much data to support this, and you can bet that your ad pumping friends aren't going to come up with it. To really make headway in this space, there needs to be more research around what's really working - full feed or summary, and where the ads are garnering the best CTR. More to the point, ads in a 'full feed' item vs. ads in a 'summary feed' item will *likely* require a different tact. Again, no data to support this yet, but I'd error on the side of 'let's approach them with unique tactics' than on the side of just throwing ads in every which where.

Matt Galloway has been digging into the book The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy by Jon Berry and Ed Keller as of late, and calls out bloggers as the poster children of the influentials. Fair enough, certainly blogs are skewed to the early adopter set, but not all bloggers are influential, and certainly not all those who are influential blog. However, online citizens generally are more vocal, active, informed and powerful members of their social circles.

[via http://www.ipdi.org/UploadedFiles/political%20influentials.pdf]

That being said, and illustrated, I don't know that I agree with his statement that the influentials are not reachable through highly niche targeted onlne ads, and I don't think that putting AdSense by Google the Ad Pumper and other category-level interest RSS or blog ads in the same lump assumption really does the medium justice.

It's true that (good) bloggers can equal Influentials. And that's precisely the reason that advertising to targeted, online niche audiences makes sense. Although, you don't need to put bloggers in the mix to make it effective. Let's say we remove the bloggers from this entirely and focus on a more mainstream publisher, say, the Washington Post. Let's not forget, the study pointed out the fact that "traditional advertising" was not as effective at reaching influentials.

I know I'm biased, but I'd hardly call the 'long form ad' that seems to be working in RSS traditional advertising. More to the point, I don't think we can waive the white flag and say that these advertising tools are nonsense, when, in fact, we have major media outlets stating that they make a lot of sense.

At the end of the movie, it looks like this. Influentials buy things, just like the rest of us buy things. They find out about things sooner because they run in different circles than the rest of us. As smart marketers, we need to be in those circles. Right now, RSS is one of the channels into that circle, and we need to be there to reach the influentials who are there now too.

(Incidentally, there's no shortage of buzz about the Washington Post's decision to roll out RSS advertising!)

I had no idea that this wiki existed, but thanks to Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed for pointing it out!

[wiki] Things you can do with RSS

Not that I would claim to have extra time on my hands, but I had a moment this morning where I was thining about some old friends, owners of small businesses or media agencies, with whom I'd love to keep in better contact. (or, that I wish would keep in better contact with me...two way street, sure, but you send me info first...come to think of it, I am communicating with you, read my damn blog)

I was also thinking about all of the companies that I've done business with in the past year that I'd like to have relationships with. You know why I had to think about these people, because they've made me. They've made me think about them, which takes energy, because they don't have good email newsletters (OK option) and they don't have RSS feeds from their sites. (if they had a damned feed, or newsletter, I'd be forced, albeit by my own choice, to hear about them on a semi-regular basis)

Now, granted, I'm not a customer now (was formerly, not at present) but I will be a customer again. Please, give me something to work with here people. Communicate with me regualary. I want that!

They are breaking a very simple rule.

If you're not communicating regulary with your customers and those who have been or could be your customers, rest assured that your competitors are!

I'd have thought that we'd be leveling the playing field by now. Meaning that every company would have at least one way for customers to 'opt in' to hearing more from them. Just one!

What the hell people? Are companies not confident that people want to hear from them? Do you not have anything to say? (what the hell are you doing every day?) Damnit, just one opt in! That's all I need...AT LEAST GIVE ME THE OPPORTUNITY TO ALLOW YOU TO JAM INFORMATION DOWN MY THROAT!

Action creates information and ideas. If you're company is doing anything but standing dead ass still, you're creating something of value that can be shared with past, current and future customers to show them a bit of life!

Some recent discussions have brought up a volley of concerns around how new subscribers/readers coming into contact with feeds that are spliced together either via the major publicity & aggregation engines or the RSS splicing done by advertisers will know who those feeds are from & why they're reading them.

For example. Let's say that your product name is "American Association", but there's a whole slew of others with "American Associations" of some sort. Right? So, when the people that really want to keep tabs on what's going on with your assocation through, say, a Technorati feed search on "American Association", they are going to also pick up a bit of other stuff that they don't want. It's not really spam, because they're certainly asked for it, but it's not the core material that they were looking for. Let's call this extra stuff 'peripheral postings' for argument's sake.

Are you doing anything to distinguish your RSS feed from everyone else? Is your logo in your feed? Do you have your tagline in each post?

Any ideas on identifying each post as yours as the amount of feed splicing and aggregating grows with the popularity of Technorati, PubSub, and Feedster?

So Says Scoble. I concur.

I was in a discussion the other day with someone on the issue of whether or not they should offer a number of one click Icons like the ones that NewsGator, BlogLines, and other feed readers offer. At the end of the day - we somehow need to make it easier to do one-click RSS subscription. I'm bummed that I have to perform a multi click, pain in the ass process to get feeds into NewsGator. Granted, it's not complicated, but it's certainly at least a small barrier to adoption.

How fitting that the majority of the marketing messages relating to the newest, and most comprehensive e-book on RSS is likely to be delivered through the very medium which is the topic of the book. I'm talking about the buzz on Rok Hrastnik's new book, "[Aff] Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS."

This is a new e-book on RSS for marketers: "Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS" by European e-marketer Rok Hrastnik, who spent the last year or two researching an exhaustive review of RSS & syndication technology on the web. I was interviewed for the book, along with over 30 other fine folks in the blogging/RSS space.

http://rss.marketingstudies.net/

Having read an advance copy of the book, I can say that I'm honestly blown away by the thoroughness of Rok's approach the subject, from both a technical and marketing perspective. Rok literally left no resource unchecked and no stone unturned as he put together this seminal resource on RSS. The best thing is that It's a living document - Rok has committed to constant updates that will be available to purchasers.

Rok has put out a great resource on RSS that covers the ins and outs of RSS in 550 pages, and he'll be updating the ebook as necessary. It's also among the least expensive e-books (especially at 550 pages) that I've seen at under $40. 'Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS' includes 33 interviews with people such as Robin Good, Alex Barnett, Bill Flitter (Pheedo), yours truly and plenty more who have been writing on the subject of RSS marketing over the last year or so.

Check it out: Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS

Disclaimer: I did contribute to the book.

[Update] There are a lot of folks talking about this book:
Alex Barnett: Why RSS matters in the marketing world
Paul Chaney: New RSS Marketing Book Released
Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: RSS for marketers
Derek Scruggs: New RSS e-Book
Dwight Shih: Unleash the Power of RSS
MarketingVOX: Huge RSS Study Released

As I travel more, and take your feeds with me, I'm constantly annoyed at the posts where I just get to the good part and...

Also, buy Rok's book. Learn about the true power of RSS, and oh yeah, make your feeds full...

OK, I understand that this needs a bit more explanation - so here goes:

There are a few advantages of providing full-text content items:
Users don't need to click-through to your web site to read the entire article, ergo less work involved for getting the content they want, which translates in to better odds that they'll read your content. By providing full-text content items you are turning the RSS aggregator into a "one-stop content consumption point".

Many bloggers blog from RSS - If you don't put full text in your feeds, I can't get your point unless I go to the blog site, and with the current 300 feeds that I browse, that's unlikely. Scoble reads more like 1000.

Full text or summary depends on your goals:
* If you goal is to connect with 'other bloggers', especially "A and B+ List Bloggers" and have them link to you via trackbacks & permalinks, then it is wise to provide full feed for these people to read in their medium of choice - their RSS reader.
* If you goal is to generate drive-to for your site, or for the advertisers on your site, then certainly using excerpted feeds are to your advantage and meet the mission of your site.
* If you goal is to generate 'interactivity' on your site via comments, full or excerpted posts are not a relevant issue. If a reader wants to comment, they'll click through and comment. You're not losing any of the community aspects of your site by doing a full text feed.

In my opinion, "Why do you want readers to visit you site?" is a fundamental question that needs asking before you decide.

There are also other options where you can offer multiple feeds and let readers choose, if it meets your objectives.

When you consider reading RSS through the frame of reference of a NewsGator (via the Outlook plugin) reader, we read your feed in the same way we read email. Literally. As I'm going through my unread email, it includes both posts from the 270 feeds I subscribe to, and new email. To me, reading exerpted posts is like getting email from a friend that makes me go somewhere else to finish reading what that person has to say.

Too important not to link to. TDavid & Scoble have been discussing Martin's issue w/ RSS copyright.

A Copyfighter's Musings - More on RSS and Copyright [via: Scoble]

I think that I have some cognitive barrier around the the concept of "not getting it." I always think that when someone says that a group of people "don't get it", it means that they are somehow missing the underlying essence of the thing in question. Though, as I frequently see, and become increasing irritated by, people are saying that 'such and such still doesn't get it' when what they really are referring to is the simple fact that some are not as far along on the adoption curve as an enlightened few of us.

I pose the following:

At the AMA seminar in Seattle, I posited that 'adoption' of weblogs & RSS of weblogs would reach a desired critical mass when Lotus Notes had an RSS reader. Why did I say that (notice, I did NOT say that most corporations don't get RSS or blogs). I meant that for a large number of major corporations (including almost the entire US gov) there are certain barriers to adoption, including technology, awareness, policy, ROI & justification, and personal bias that get in the way. It doesn't always mean that 'they don't get it', rather, it's a function of adoption.

Seriously, tell it like it is. If there really is something that people are missing in a big way, then I can agree that 'they don't get it', however, if it's simply a function of adoption, then keep pushing, but again, tell it like it is.

Bill at Pheedo highlights 7 reasons to migrate to RSS.

1. Sender ID
2. CAN SPAM ACT
3. Blacklists
4. Known Sender
5. Email Filters
6. Bonded Sender Program
7. Cost of Sending Email

These are seven strong reasons for any marketer to at least consider testing RSS advertising. The nature of RSS and its one-click unsubscribe functionality makes this new marketing medium self-policing - no need for filters or government intervention.

As a WSJ online-only subscriber, I got this email yesterday. It's great to see that they have so many RSS feeds available, and even better to see that they're being proactive in trying to educate readers on RSS and RSS readers (sub) and how they can help people to their jobs.

__________________________________
NEW FEATURES
from The Wall Street Journal Online

Dear Subscriber,

We've gotten many questions from our readers in recent weeks about RSS feeds. Some of those are from subscribers wondering when The Wall Street Journal Online would provide them; others are from readers wondering what RSS is all about.

We are pleased to tell you that our feeds are now available. And we also have a guide to get you into RSS, which stands for, among other things, "really simple syndication."

In a nutshell, RSS feeds enable you to view constantly updated headlines from the Online Journal, as well as from our network of free Journal sites. RSS also makes it possible for you to read Journal headlines alongside those from other online publications. Subscribers who click on Online Journal article headlines will be taken to the Online Journal site where they can read the full text of the articles.

To use RSS, you will need a special news reader that will allow you to collect and display the feeds. Most news readers automatically retrieve updates, helping you to stay current with latest news and columns. There are many readers available; most of them are free, while others provide special features for a fee.

For more information on our feeds and instructions on how to set them up, please visit:
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/0,,0_0813,00.html?mod=newf072704

This is just our first step into the world of RSS. If you have suggestions on how we can improve our offerings, please let us know by emailing us at newseditors@wsj.com.

Thanks very much.

Best regards,

Bill Grueskin
Managing Editor, The Wall Street Journal Online

Well, how do you like them apples.

Alex Barnett says about all there is to say in ongoing discussion of the finer points of Email and RSS in this little diagram on Email vs. RSS or Webfeeds...

[via Anil Dash & Jeremy @ Ensight]

will write more about this in a bit... found this via Bill Flitter (a former fellow Wisconsinite, and UW-Oshkosh Alumnus) of Pheedo - great stuff they're doing over there!

http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2004/02/publishsubscrib.html
The publish-subscribe service has a number of unique aspects that can make advertising more effective and more responsive to user needs and desires:

1. Because responses to subscriptions and the ads in them are more likely to be relevant to user needs, publish-subscribe services can afford to place fewer ads in each unit of content delivered.
2. Because publish/subscribe services provide tools that allow great precision in searches and ensure that the user is in control of the content they receive, it becomes possible to think of "ads as content.
3. Doing "branding" with banner ads, etc. has proven difficult.
4. PubSub content is typically delivered a message at a time rather than as a list of results.
5. Publish/Subscribe services, because they have persistent lists of subscriptions, can provide precise predications as to how many people will see any particular ad as well as how many people are likely to see any particular content with which an ad might be associated. Thus, it becomes possible for advertisers to have much more effective tools for budgeting and planning their campaigns.

In the WTN email newsletter today, I noticed the following blurb, which excites, yet confuses me.

WTN announces website syndication

   The Wisconsin Technology Network is now offering WTN’s news and headlines for syndication. The technology, XML, allows any web host to take WTN’s up-to-the minute headlines and run them on their own companies website, with direct links back to WTN’s homepage. See Portofino Group as an example.

Sure, XML, or RSS allows other sites to syndicate your data, but is that really why you'd do this? Why not broach the subject of the benefits of RSS for your corporate readers, or mention how much easier it might be to get your news if you used a feed vs. the email, or how you can get around corporate spam filter issues by using RSS...nope, they chose to tout the syndication benefits.

I'm pretty excited about being able to track RSS! It means there are almost no reasons not to pursue RSS as a corporate communication medium. Odd, but I wonder if this is one of those things that they'll try to patent and all the great companies that use the technology will get sued in a few years. Amazon is getting the shaft on some broad shopping cart technology right now...bummer.

"In our November, 2003 issue, we first introduced you to IMN¹s RSS feature which allows you to instantly start publishing RSS feeds that link directly to your newsletter or weblog. Today, we¹ll give you more information on our RSS features including insights on how it can fit into your marketing program and an overview of our new trackable RSS feed feature." - IMN
http://newsletter.imninc.com/e_article000232339.cfm?x=a2DGdnL,agGDkvg

Seth G. mentioned Bloglines on his site today, but I've been using this thing for months now and can't imagine getting RSS newsfeeds any other way!

I've been saying that RSS can be a little scary for newcomers and non-techies and will not be adopted by the masses for some time, but Bloglines' free, Web-Based News Aggregator let's you put all the blogs you read in one place, and you only have one site to visit for all you're RSS fed information. Moreover, you don't have to install any software.

Rumor has it that Bloglines will be free for a while, but may move to a fee-based model as the service becomes more refined. For those of us using the system, I"m quite sure that I'll ante up for any reasonable fee.

EmailSherpa: How Big Companies are Testing RSS Feeds to Circumvent Email: RSS 101 + Useful Links

Janet Roberts of Marketing Sherpa does a fantastic job of taking on the topic of RSS feeds within the web-world of Corporate America, and goes on to explain some of the basic tenents of RSS technology.

It's also great to know that EmailLabs will be supporting RSS from their email campaign manager very soon.

Oh, and [shameless plug follows...] I'm quoted in there as saying:

-- Are my clients or customers ready for this?

Dana VandenHeuvel, new media director for Web-services
company Balance Studios, saw many potential
uses for RSS feeds over email deliveries at his former
employer, a major contract-furniture manufacturer.

"People in that industry were not e-savvy," VandenHeuvel
said. "It would be falling on deaf ears as to what our user
base would glean from it, because they didn't understand the
value of the technology."

If your job involves any kind of industry research or competitive intelligence, RSS news readers can be a powerful strategic tool, helping you monitor many information and news sources quickly and easily.

Jordan Ayan - RSS news readers help you keep up with a world of information

Reading News and Blogs via Really Simple Syndication - Spam Free
http://email.about.com/cs/rss/a/rss_spam_free.htm

Dylan Greene shares his 10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time. I agree with most of them, but don't really care about things like wasting bandwidth. Think about it. Most of those who've been smart enough to figure out how to get RSS feeds are on broadband and could give two shakes about bandwidth. I also disagree that "reading" RSS requires too much work. Reading is the great part. I read 25 sites through RSS and it's the most time I could save in a day. I do think, however, that they're a bitch to find and subscribe to, and there are too many standards, as Dylan states. I wish that every site I likes had an RSS feed, but they don't...

Dylan, you might also be incorrect on the number of posts that RSS readers can keep current with. NewsGator and BlogLines, both of which I've used (although I've switched to Bloglines simply because I don't have Outlook everywhere I go...) allow me to download as many RSS entries as I want. I just grabbed 250 entries from Scoble's blog.

BTW, check out the RSS Winterfest today and tomorrow.

The upcoming 6.0 release of EmailUnlimited software will also provide an add-on service that lets you publish your email newsletter in RSS automatically, being hosted on our own web site.

Then you won't have to worry about the tech part of RSS anymore, but simply push a button and it will be done for you.

Robin Good (Luigi Canali De Rossi) is the Editor of Sharewood Tidings, has put together a comprehensive resource on the features/benefits/advantages of RSS and some of the pros & cons that go along with it.

RSS is good because it gives back to individual users the power to choose and select content. This, along with timeliness, portability and cost-effectiveness, are probably the best reasons why you should understand how and why RSS is going to change the way you select and receive your information, news and updates.

Related Resources:
Media Post: A New Channel - Let's Not Mess It Up
Saved by Zero: RSS Readership Tracking

Check out the recent article on RSS posted on Brandadvocate.com.

The article is on the use of RSS and its implications for Internet marketers. It is targeted at the novice to intermediate web marketing professional. The article clearly calls out the features, advantages, benefits, and pitfalls of RSS. The piece is meant to spark and further the awareness of RSS as an Internet marketing communication vehicle.

I've also posted the full version, complete with additional reference materials, on the website.

related links:
RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmaster
Explanation of RSS, how you can use it, and finding RSS feeds
Syndicated content: more than just some file formats
BBC News site offers syndication feeds
New wave of newsreader software makes sense of the Web
RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content Providers