Remarkablogger

You’ve heard it before, but it’s still true

RSS: Personal News Aggregators Promise To Alter Web Use is a very brief article that offers basics on how automatic syndication of content over the internet is changing the internet and business landscapes. Two trends that really began to gain steam in the 90s—decentralization and mass customization—show no signs of stopping. The idea of a centralized portal that decides what content you’ll see isn’t exactly dead, yet. But its time is over, which even the king of all portals recognizes.

Feed frenzy

Using a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), people subscribe for free to RSS feeds. Feeds are gathered together (aggregated) from multiple sites and displayed on your computer using special feed-reading software (the news aggregators mentioned above) or even other websites, like Bloglines.

That’s nice—what the heck does it do?

What kind of information do people access via RSS? Everything from News to blog posts to time-shifted audio shows called podcasts (as in Apple’s iPod music player—more on this next week). You can subscribe to

• news headlines of all different kinds
• your favorite blogs
• podcasts
• applications yet to be invented

Yeah, but this is just for computer nerds

The number of people using RSS is growing very quickly and it will soon become mainstream. No special knowledge is required to use RSS feeds or RSS feed reading software, and it will only get easier to use. As it gets easier to use, more and more people will adopt it. Advertisers are now looking at RSS as a means to serve targeted advertising. RSS can be used to distribute and serve content of any type:

• news headlines
• blog postings
• specials of the day from your restaurant
• stock market data
• real estate properties listings
• announcements on the company intranet

David Beisel, a venture capitalist, agrees.
Here are some more things you can do with RSS. And some more.

How do I learn more and get started?

One of the more popular site-based RSS feed services is Bloglines. Bloglines lets you manage and see your feeds in a web browser, which is great if you travel a lot and are away from your desktop. Here is an introduction to setting up and using Bloglines. If you’re new to this whole RSS thing and want to see what it’s all about. I recommend you get yourself a free Bloglines account and try it for a coupla weeks. It didn’t take long for me set my Bloglines page as my browser’s home page. The feeds I subscribe to are the links you see in my blog. Here’s a picture of my Bloglines page:

While you can have blogs without RSS, there’s no point to using RSS at all unless there’s fresh content once in a while. From a business perspective, it’s like having a permanent link with your Clients so that you’re always there and residing at the top of a Client’s awareness. It’s kind of like what commercials promised so long ago, but could never really deliver, simply because commercials push and interrupt and annoy the very people they hope to persuade. But people choose to subscribe to an RSS feed. So as long as it’s providing something they want, you’ve got that connection with them. You’ve got their attention. You can, over time, build a relationship with them and make deposits into their “trust accounts” so that they turn to you when they need what you’ve got. They will feel like they know you.

Coming Soon: Part Three: Podcasting