RSS and Your Competitive Edge

(Some of the background for this article was published by Titus Hoskins of bizwaremagic.com. Titus cautions: "Don't underestimate the potential of this new way of moving content around the web. This one could deliver big returns. Is your site ready for RSS?")

Really Simple Syndication

What is this RSS that I am hearing so much about lately? It's going to change the way I get my news, and become a feature of every web site, I am being told.

Here's the simple part, what the letters stand for: RSS = Really Simple Syndication. Well maybe not so simple, some say they used to stand for Rich Site Summary.

Let's look at it first from the perspective of the consumer, then we'll think about the possibilities of becoming the syndicator.

The "simple" in RSS is a matter of opinion. If you want to get the feed from Inc Magazine, for example, go to the Inc web site, press the "RSS" button to get the URL for the feed, which is http://www.inc.com/rss.xml.

But this is only programming code, and has to be run through a news reader or converted to HTML. We found a really useful converter  which "scraped" the top 3 headlines, shown here: (we'll pick up again under the headlines).

But once in place, this is dynamic, it is continuously updated content with no further effort on your part. You scan the headlines, if one or more catches your eye you click on it to get the complete story.

To see an application using multiple and varied feeds see our Daily News. We have essentially created a personalized newspaper that may have stories changing or being updated every minute. Ours leans a bit heavily on the New York Times, but we have some New Orleans news, business news, movie reviews, technology reviews, even the latest entries from my political blog.

So that was fun putting together, and now I'll be better informed with less effort. Is there any commercial benefit that we can derive from this technology? Certainly, if you have something to say in which others are interested.

My blog is powered by Blogger, which automatically produces an Atom feed, Atom being a format variant on RSS. So, by giving the address of our Atom feed to someone, we are allowing them an easy way to keep up with our writings which, hopefully, they can use to business advantage.

Titus describes RSS as "... don't come to us; we will deliver the information to you or your website," adding "It syndicates your content. In a nutshell; it's simply a more efficient way to get your content 'out there'".

What has allowed RSS to grow so rapidly is the availability of more, and more convenient, methods of making its content readable. MyYahoo can track your favorite feeds automatically, and the Firefox browser has some RSS-friendly features. Blogs, now almost required in business, form a natural source for RSS content.

Getting Subscribers to your feed

MyYahoo also has an RSS feature where members can access different RSS feeds that interest them. Make sure you have the 'AddToMyYahoo' or 'XML' button on your site. Each time a subscriber opens their MyYahoo site - your RSS feed will be updated.

You can also add 'MyMSN' similarly to MyYahoo. These are pages that your subscriber is already reading. Other useful buttons for separate news readers include Bloglines and Newsgator. You want to give your site visitors every opportunity to subscribe to your RSS feed or Blog.

One more concept to learn, Tags!

A tag may be thought of as the category under which your site should be classified. Tags have received a lot of attention lately because Technorati, which indexes 4.5 million blogs, started sorting blog posts by using tags. At del.icio.us you create a tag when you bookmark a page.

We placed the following in our blog to create a tag for "Louisiana Politics:"

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Louisiana Politics" rel="tag">Louisiana Politics</a>

Tags are really keywords for blogs and they can help you to generate traffic for your site.

Titus suggests that web pages can even be designed around these tags and RSS Feeds. Directly deliver or pull all this content onto an RSS Supersite. Say you have a website on 'notebook computers'! You could pull RSS Feeds on all the different brands, all the product review materials, all the company information or updates, etc. and build a content rich RSS Supersite.

You could even compile this Supersite into an RSS Feed and deliver it to all your interested prospects. The RSS feed is now the most efficient way to deliver information that is highly concentrated and more 'on topic' than web pages.