Hobgit Web Hosting News

XML-based datafeeds are becoming popular tools for delivering content to online audiences from Web sites. But such RSS feeds are far from popular with publishers intent on boosting page view statistics and fearing leakage through content that’s delivered to users who will never come in to their sites.

Photo credit: Nikolai Sorokin

The real issue is not feeds but the need for publishers to accept that an important portion of their revenues will rely on understanding how to make money from content delivered to their audience’s personal devices and Web sites.

Some leaders are already making good money on feeds: what will it take for others to follow suit?

Here is the full story:

Traditional news datafeeds were not always the most popular products to be selling in my days as a Reuters marketing manager. Feeds were seen by some as a threat to the Reuters Terminal product, a PC-based software package loaded with graphics and analytics features that cost a bundle to put on the typical securities trader’s desk.

Oftentimes those Reuters Terminal PCs got their securities market data and news from a Reuters datafeed anyway, but if the client chose to take the feed into another content display system or just pump it into a database, their revenues per user would be less.

Today market data feeds are a way of life the securities industry. Companies like Reuters are doing just fine, though, thanks to major adjustments in their marketing strategies that focus on optimizing feed products for the venues that matter most to their clients.

Ultra-fast feeds support their increasingly automated trading functions and sophisticated analysis software used by their most talented staff. With major financial institutions trimming their trading staffs aggressively in favor of more efficient strategies supported by feeds the days of the all-singing, all-dancing financial display product as a revenue leader are numbered, if not already past.

As a new generation of feeds begin to flourish on the Web some of the same worries that have furrowed brows at financial content companies are wrinkling the foreheads of major media company executives. Clicking on the familiar orange icon found in many Web browsers can produce an XML-formatted feed of updates from a Web site into your PC or mobile device - or your own Web site.

The popularity of this fairly standard feature is growing quickly amongst both online trend-setters and enterprises trying to absorb online content into their own operations.

So the recent news of Yahoo’s trimming support for RSS feeds does not come as a complete surprise.

Feeds have spread fear before.

Yahoo is pushing hard to become the online destination of choice for media content, grabbing a boatload of licensed and acquired content to pump up its page views and its advertising revenues. But wile there’s a fair amount of user-generated content in Yahoo’s recipe this is still a classic aggregation play: my site will have more good stuff than your site, so it will be worth more to advertisers and subscribers. Feeds will only cloud the real issue in Yahoo’s view as it tries to build its page view statistics into powerful sales tools for advertisers and subscribers.

In spite of Yahoo’s apparent skepticism online feeds are on the rise. A recent report on major magazine and newspaper publishers shows 78 percent of surveyed newspapers using RSS-formatted XML feeds and 48 percent of magazines using RSS feeds.

But none of the respondents were placing advertising in those feeds: RSS feeds are seen mostly as a lure to bring users back to their Web site. The Wall Street Journal is now monetizing its feeds with ads, though, pointing the way for others to reconsider feeds as a tool for revenues.

With the rise of online RSS feeds, publishers need to consider how best to position themselves aggressively with a medium that promises to upend profit equations as much as financial feeds reset the stage in financial market data.

Here are a few thoughts as to how to approach using online feeds profitably:

• The limits of Web sites as content services are showing

  

  With the strong emphasis on page views some media companies are missing out on the value of the Web as a broadcast medium that people can filter according to their own needs. Web sites are important tools for providing convenient content packaging but The New Aggregation argues that insisting on Web site visits draws content away from the uses that audiences demand in their own business and personal lifestyles. Think of feeds as a broadcast to home and mobile theatres and your Web site as your downtown theatre: today it takes both experiences to build up a property into a profitable media star.

• Time for a new generation of metrics

  

  As Steve Rubel points out in a recent article page views don’t always capture how people interact with increasingly sophisticated content that combines text, graphics and software-enabled functionality into something that’s far more than just a page.

  As RSS feeds enable a new generation of content services to add value on desktops and mobile devices, publishers need to get more comfortable with devising performance metrics that follow content into the audience’s own platforms - and that travel with content as users share it with one another. Services like FeedBurner already provide measurable performance for feed content: it’s up to publishers to take advantage of advanced content performance measurements tools to appeal to a new generation of advertisers.

• Not all feeds need to be created equal

  
  The proliferation of bone-simple content syndication via XML feeds belies the full potential of feeds as a transport for delivering valuable content. As content becomes more a blend of information and services wrapped in XML “widget” putting together these packages is going to increasingly allow for RSS feeds to be consumed by audiences on the platform of their choice.

  Some feeds may be free or ad-supported broadcasts but there’s a lot of potential for premium feeds that go beyond mere text, links and graphics to sophisticated payloads that engage audiences at a higher level. Just because you’re using standards such as XML to shuttle content around in feeds doesn’t mean that your content can’t break out into unique value-add configurations once it’s delivered.

Feeds are neither a panacea nor a threat for online publishing: they are only a transport mechanism that allows publishers to service clients in multiple venues of their own choosing. The proliferation of feeds calls upon publishers to take a far more sophisticated view of how content payloads sent out via RSS feeds can be shaped into products that can return revenues.

Companies like Reuters struggled for years to shape feeds into a “terminal”-centric view of markets before accepting that old performance metrics weren’t as important as happy customers who were helping them to make money.

That’s a thought worth feeding on for a while in the world of online content.

Originally published by John Blossom as “Feed on This: Publishers Face the Dilemma of Content in Motion” on December 6, 2006.

Find out more about John Blossom and the management consulting services of Shore Communications Inc. covering enterprise, media and personal publishing at Shore.com.

Photo credits
Fence stop: Lev Mel
Report Chart: Pei Ling Hoo
Red peg: msv

Social Media Marketing can be a great way to boost awareness of your brand, business or website and the good news is that it won’t cost you a thing. Here’s how to get started:

Photo credit: Mark Stay

Traditional marketing has typically taken an “interruptive” hard-sell approach to getting your attention. You might be watching TV, for instance, and have the show you’re watching suddenly stop for a round of commercial breaks, or find yourself looking for content as you flip through the ads in magazine.

Social media marketing, on the other hand, is very much focused on engagement, community and authority. What is boils down to is the creation of valuable, engaging content within the context of online communities, and building reputation and authority within these communities and your content niche.

While it arguably might be easier to just plough your money into interruptive advertising, and sit back to wait on the results, social media marketing has two advantages to this approach.

First and foremost, it doesn’t need to cost you a single cent.

Secondly, social media marketing gives you the opportunity to laser target your prospective audience or clients, and have them willingly spread the word about your brand.

In this beginner’s guide to social media marketing, I take you through:

• Social Media Basics - What is social media, and why does it matter?
• What social social media means - Everything you need to know to get a quick handle on the idea
• Why you might want to use social media marketing in terms of real world benefits to your website, blog or business
• How to get started if you want to put social media marketing to use
• Essential social media that you might want to start using if you want to boost your online presence
• The social media press release and why you might want to use it instead of the typical press release approach
• Creative Commons licensing and viral media - how giving your work away is the best thing you can

Here are the details:

Social Media - The Basics

Social Media is defined by Wikipedia as:

“Participatory online media where news, photos, videos, and podcasts are made public via social media websites through submission. Normally accompanied with a voting process to make media items become “popular”“

The term is a loose one, but goes a long way to describing the new, democratic media found online, and the emphasis on sharing placed on web destinations from personal blogs to YouTube and social bookmarking services like del.icio.us.

If you’ve ever put (or shared) a video online, written a blog post, posted to Twitter, created a profile on Facebook, or shared one of your favorite websites through del.icio.us, you are already a social media maker.

Mainstream media operate in a less socially conscious way - they broadcast or print their messages to a large, slightly fuzzy, audience and offer a more minimal degree of interaction between content creator and content consumer.

Social media, on the other hand, is focused very much on the conversation. When you write a blog post, people can enter into a conversation with you in the comments. On Facebook, your friends can send you messages, share applications and photos, or just drop a note on your “wall”. If you publish a video to YouTube, others can add it to a playlist, leave a comment, or even post a video reply to your original content.

Social media can be a lot of fun, then, but it also has great potential as a means to build the presence, reputation and visibility of your business or personal brand. And this is where social media marketing comes in.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing, as you might have already guessed, is an approach to spreading awareness of your web content or brand via the vast variety of social media destination on the web.

However, while it perhaps shares similar goals with traditional marketing - converting casual passers-by into potential clients, readers, advertisers or whatever else your goal might be - the methodology is profoundly different.

Traditional marketing attempted to send out a broad, sweeping message to as many people as possible in the hope that some small fraction of them would respond to the “call to action” placed. Traditional marketing is very often about interrupting what your reader or site visitor is doing to barrage them with a message.

You can see this both on television and in print media, but also online. Banner advertising, pre-roll ads that run before a video starts playing, and annoying splash advertising pages that appear before you can access an article in full are just three examples.

Their efficiency is questionable, and seems to be on the wane.

Social media marketing is marketing without the hard sell. Rather than trying to force your one-way message down the throats of passersby, with social media marketing you attempt to offer valuable content, suggestions, contributions to conversations and engagement, spreading your offerings as far and wide as is possible.

In this way, you build both presence across a number of online destinations - increasing your web traffic - while simultaneously cementing your reputation and authority within your chosen subject or content niche.

Why Use Social Media Marketing?

There are a number of reasons you might want to put some time and effort into creating a social media marketing strategy:

• If you have more time than money to spend on building the reputation and visibility of your business, social media marketing provides you with a free or cheap way to go about it, if you are willing to invest the time in doing so
• If you wish to complement your existing marketing practices and build your reputation as an authority in your field
• If you are hoping to build qualified, niche-targeted traffic to your website
• If you are looking to build on your search engine presence and increase your Google ranking, so that your results are seen above those of your nearest competitors
• If you want to open conversation with your users, readers or customers and gather feedback from them as how to best progress with your latest content or product offerings
• If you want to build a community of regular visitors and “evangelists” for your brand, willingly spreading the word about what you do without economic incentives

And that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Given time and effort on your part, an effective social media strategy isn’t going to make all of your problems go away, nor is it going to turn an ill-conceived idea into a good one. But it will, without a doubt, build your standing, bring you more traffic to your website and establish your presence on the web.

How To Get Started

So how do you go about social media marketing and how much time is it going to take you? The short answer is, how long is a piece of string? The degree of effort (and passion) you are willing to invest in your social media marketing campaign will likely relate directly to the results you see.

Here are some starting points for you to make the jump:

• Blog! - If you don’t have a blog already, you need to start one. Far and away the most effective and powerful tool in your social media marketing arsenal is going to be your blog.

  If you don’t know how to get started, you might want to check out my Beginner’s Blog Publishing Guide, which will take you through everything you need to know to get up and running.

  Once you’re up and running, you might want to check out Robin Good’s guide to becoming a successful online publisher to really take you to the next level.

  In short, blog about a particular niche subject (the one directly connected to your business), write often, and apply some solid search engine optimization tricks and you’ll be well on the way to kick-starting your social media marketing strategy

• Listen! - If you are going to make a real splash with your blog and other content, you need to listen to what’s being said about you, the latest news in your niche content area, and even the hot discussion points outside of your niche.

  If you are in tune with all of this information, you will be in a much better position to both write and share compelling content, and you’ll never be accused of not taking part in the discussion at the heart of social media practice.

  RSS is your ultimate friend here. RSS is a great way of gathering information from all over the web and bringing it to an email inbox style “reader” where you can digest the latest news as it is published.

  If you’d like to pick up some tricks on how you can use RSS to listen in on the latest news and discussions in your favorite niche topic, you might want to check out my Guide To Really Simple Syndication Benefits, Best Uses And Applications.

• Respond! - It’s one thing to listen to what’s been discussed about you, your content, and the latest news in your field. It’s quite another to respond.

  One effective way to build your online presence and authority is to leave informed, thoughtful comments on other blogs when they discuss your business, or talk about something of interest to you or your brand.

  Being responsive to feedback, and on top of the latest trends in your industry is a subtle form of marketing in and of itself. There’s no need to leave ad-lite type comments dropping in your web address and what you do. Carefully thought-through responses that add to the conversation will gain your far more respect, and people will in turn click through to your website from the URL link attached to your name.

• Share! - Finally, when you find interesting information, videos, blogs or other content online, make an effort to share it with others. The same goes for your own content. Over time, if you make use of some of the services mentioned below - social bookmarking services, for instance - to give something of value to the communities you join, you will build up respect and kudos for doing so.

  There’s a lot of information out there competing for people’s attention. By pointing out great things that you’ve found, and drawing attention to your own work, you can people a great service. Over time, you’ll be acknowledged as a subject area expert, and both turned to and recommended.

Essential Social Media

Which social media tools and destinations should you make use of? There is no simple answer to this question, as there are as many niche communities and services as there are days in a year (or decade, more likely).

Nevertheless, there are certain key tools and services that you definitely might want to make use of in your social media marketing strategy. Here are some of them to get you started:

• Your blog - whether you use Blogger, Wordpress or Movable Type, your blog is likely to be the center of your social media marketing universe. It’s here that you have the best chance of building your brand, sharing great tips, reflections, advice and news with your readers, and carving out a niche for yourself.

  Blogging is also one of the best ways to boost the search engine ranking of your website. Blog often and blog well, and you will receive both inbound links and more chance of being discovered.

  For some great tips on bringing your blog to the next level, you could check out Robert Scoble’s 15 Points To A Killer Blog presentation or Robin Good’s own, recent guide to professional blogging.

• Social bookmarking services - Social bookmarking services make it easy for you to share the cool websites and videos you find online. Rather than simply adding the website to your own private set of favorites, social bookmarking lets you publish your latest find to the web for all to see.

  People within the communities using these services can then find, browse and subscribe to your bookmarks, which you can also add category “tags” to, helping them to find relevant and interesting information on the web.

  The most popular of these services is arguably del.icio.us, and if you take the time to set up an account there and regularly add relevant and interesting bookmarks to your own content and that of others, it is likely to pay dividends in winning you attention, respect and traffic.

  To maximize your chances of discovery further, you might consider using a tool like OnlyWire, which will allow you to add a bookmark to several different services simultaneously, with a single click. This gives you even more chance of having your content or recommendations found, shared and discussed.

• Social News services - Social news services allow anyone to submit a news item or blog post to their respective communities, where it will compete with other stories for user votes. The most popular stories rise to the top, and least interesting fade rapidly into obscurity.

  The most popular social news destination is Digg. One idea to increase your chances of people seeing and voting on your own blog content is to add a “Digg this” widget to your blog posts. That way if one or more of your readers likes what they see, they can add their vote for your article right from your blog itself. Depending on which blogging platform you use, the way you might add this button to your blog posts varies. Try googling “Digg this widget” and adding the name of your blog platform, such as “wordpress”, “blogger” or “movable type” and you’ll be up and running.

  Other popular social news sites you can submit your content to, and build your reputation by submitting other relevant content, include Reddit, Netscape and Newsvine, and Alex Iskold does a great job of discussing the differences between them in his Social news faceoff article for Read/WriteWeb.

• RSS and commenting - As mentioned above, RSS provides you with a great way of keeping track of what’s being talked about in your community or what’s being said directly about you, your product, or your blog.

  You’ll probably begin by finding an online or desktop feed reader, which you can think of as an email inbox for news and blog posts. I make some personal recommendations on choosing a feed reader, and what you can achieve with RSS in my recent guide to RSS.

  Once you’ve subscribed to some websites that interest you, and started leaving regular, thoughtful comments, you might want to create what’s known as a vanity feed. A vanity feed (or “ego radar”) is a way of tracking all of the things people write about your blog or business online. This gives you an excellent prompt for making timely responses to what’s being said.

  If someone praises your blog, business or post, you’ll be able to quickly head over and leave a thank you in their comments section. And if they criticize you, you’ll also build a solid reputation if you can offer thoughtful responses and pay attention to what’s being said.

  Darren Rowse of Problogger.net provides a solid introduction to how you can create your own vanity feed which will get you started in no time.

• RSS and Blog Directories - Another great way of maximizing the amount of people that discover your blog is to submit it to as many RSS and blog directories as possible. This way casual browsers of these different communities may very well find your content where they might not have on Google or another search engine.

  Robin Good’s RSS Top 55 provides a constantly updated list of these services, which - given enough time - you can work through, adding further inroads to your content and boosting the chances of your being discovered by new readers.

  If you’d rather spend a little money than take a day out of your schedule, you can use relatively inexpensive submission services such as Postami and the very thorough RSS Feed Submission site to do it for you.

• Video sharing websites - Video sharing websites are also a great way to get people to discover your blog, content or business.

  By setting up accounts on YouTube and other services, you can provide another way for people to discover you and your business.

  Even if you don’t have the capabilities to make your own video - and it is easier than ever to create video content with your webcam, PowerPoint or other services like UStream - you can add value for community members by aggregating interesting videos together, or creating niche-themed playlists of existing content.

  You can then link back to your website from your video sharing account. And if you want to maximize your exposure across a number of services, you might want to use a tool like Tubemogul, which lets you upload a single video and have it added to a number of different sites simultaneously. I reviewed this excellent service recently here on Master New Media.

  For more ideas on using YouTube to help you in your social media marketing strategy, you might want to take a look at my previous guide on Ten Ways To Use YouTube To Promote Your Online Content

• Squidoo and Hubpages - Squidoo and Hubpages (previously reviewed here) are both communities in which members share blog-like articles on things that they are interested in or passionate about.

  As they are smaller communities than “blogosphere” - the sum total of blogs on the Internet - they provide an excellent way of having people discover your writing, and move on to your other content - such as that of your blog. By submitting really useful how-to guides, reviews or thoughtful opinion pieces to these services, you are given a golden opportunity to link back to your own website.

  Just as is the case with social networking services, Squidoo and Hubpages provide you with a profile where people can find out more about you, including of course links to your other content.

• Twitter - If you are interested in engaging early adopters or work in the tech industry, Twitter makes for a great way to easily share links to your content, and build a solid network of contacts in a relatively short space of time. Think of Twitter as a cross between blogging, SMS text messaging from your mobile phone, and social networking sites like Facebook.

  You add friends and contacts, and then post messages of 140 characters or less. This gives you a great platform to keep your followers updated as to the latest content you’ve created on your other social media accounts, and to enter into brief, punchy conversations about the latest news and events.

  You can read more about Twitter in my beginners guide and bloggers’ guide to how you can use it to research and promote yourself online.

The Social Media Press Release

If you are launching a new business, service, competition, or just a new aspect to your business, you might want to consider creating a social media press release to distribute to fellow bloggers.

Traditional press releases are very often deleted before they’re even read by the blogging community, so to give yourself a better chance at encouraging conversation, you need to take a slightly different approach.

In this short video (3″ 22), the concept of the social media press release is introduced in easy to understand terms.

In short, a social media press release offers bloggers a package of relevant information, drawing on various social media elements such as YouTube videos and del.icio.us bookmarks to place your news release in context, should people wish to discuss it further.

You can find more information on the social media news release, and a template that you can use to create one over at Search Engine Guide.

Give It Away - Creative Commons and Viral Marketing

Another way you can build your presence online is by making your content easy to share.

With traditional copyright, your readers aren’t granted permission to redistribute - or remix - your work without directly approaching you and asking. Creative Commons offer a number of alternative licenses you can apply to your work to make it easier for people to share and redistribute.

You can request that your readers give attribution to you when they share your work, for instance, or that they don’t alter the original version if you wish. To find out more about Creative Commons licensing, you might like to check out the series of videos compiled by Robin Good on the subject.

In short, the benefits of making it easy for people to share you work are that you will quickly be able to build your reputation as an expert, opinion leader and reliable source of information, further building your presence and traffic.

Thought leader, marketer and author Seth Godin allows anyone to download his book “Unleashing the Idea Virus” for free, but also sells the paperback on his website. This has helped Godin not only cement his reputation but also brings new readers to his blog and other books.

By giving away valuable content online, you create a great opportunity to establish your personal brand and bring in new clients, readers or advocates for your cause. While the temptation is there to charge for everything, the power of giving away something of real value can produce even better results in the medium to long term.

Creative commons licensing gives you the chance to have your ebook, podcast or blog post “go viral” - which is to say, to have one person pass it along to another, and so on, building your traffic and reputation step by step. This is the very foundation of effective social media marketing.

Summary

Social media marketing is a term used to describe a variety of approaches and techniques used to create authority, community and credibility online as a means of bringing attention to your brand or business.

If you have the time to invest in adding some simple routines to your daily publishing routine, and sharing your passion and interests in the right places, social media marketing can serve as an excellent complement to traditional marketing approaches, or in some cases as a complete replacement.

By combining niche targeted blogging and the creation of a presence - and reputation - in a variety of social media settings, you can bring a great deal of traffic to your online content.

But social media marketing is about more than just traffic - by creating trustworthy, value-rich content and disseminating it far and wide across the web, you can also build both engagement and authority for your personal brand, something that can’t be said for straightforward interruptive marketing.

In this beginner’s guide I have tried to fill in the gaps as to what social media marketing is, how you can use it, and when and where it might be useful. If you wish to build on this basic foundation, however, there are no shortage of articles and ebooks that might help you on the way, both here on Master New Media, and elsewhere on the web.

While social media marketing isn’t an instant, quick fix approach to growing your brand, in the long term it can be one of the most effective approaches in establishing your reputation online.

Additional Resources

If you’d like to read more about social media marketing, you might want to check out the following links:

• Wikipedia defines social media marketing
• The Social Media Marketing Blog
• The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing from Marketing Pilgrim
• Social Media Marketing, Eh? Let’s See What’s In Our Bag of Goodies from SEOmoz
• 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization from Influential Marketing Blog
• 21 Traffic Triggers for Social Media Marketing from Copyblogger
• The Importance of Social Media Marketing from doshdosh
• Social Media Marketing: The New SEO from Search Engine Land
• Social Media Marketing For Small Business from Search Engine Land
• PubCon: Social Media Marketing Tips from Webpronews
• Social Media Marketing in a Nutshell from doshdosh
• Social Media Marketing Roundup from Chris Garrett
• Social Media Daily, a free step-by-step ebook
• Authority Blackbook - another popular free ebook on becoming an authority website
• How to Leverage Web 2.0 & Social Media Sites to Market Your Brand & Control Your Message from SEOmoz
• Thoughts on a Product Launch Promotion from Marshall Kirkpatrick

Originally written by Michael Pick for Master New Media and titled “Social Media Marketing - A Beginner’s Guide”

If you want to aggregate and author all of your social media content from a single service, Lifestrea.ms may very well interest you.

Lifestrea.ms offers you a single solution for gathering all of your various online identities and publishing destinations into a single place.

Given that many of us use more than one, and in some cases a whole plethora of different services as we browse and publish to the web, the idea of being able to somehow bring all of this disparate content together for once comes as a very welcome promise.

Let’s say you use Twitter for short messages to friends, Flickr for photo-sharing, YouTube for uploading video, Google Reader for your RSS feeds, del.icio.us for social bookmarking, and on and on. Sooner or later you might start suffering from social networking fatigue, dreading the prospect of signing into these various accounts to check up on or produce content.

Lifestrea.ms - which is currently in private beta - provides you with a solution.

With Lifestrea.ms, which uses a whole host of open standards, you can import content from just about any social media destination on the web, gather it together into a single “life stream” and even publish new content to your various accounts without having to visit their respective websites.

Add to this the ability to create various profiles for friends, work, and even lovers, depending on what you want to share with each of them, and you have not only a powerful aggregation and authoring tool but also an excellent way to control what you share with your different online contacts.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Lifestrea.ms is packed with features, and I take a look at how they all fit together in this in-depth review.

Here are the details:

This is a guide explaining what RSS is and how to best use it. It is targeted at the non-technical user who has not had yet the opportunity to fully understand what RSS is all about and how to best put it to use.

Photo credit: Max Delson

RSS is a powerful but simple way to gather content from all over the web, making it easy for you to follow the latest updates from all of your favorite websites without having to visit them all individually.

But it’s much more than that. In this beginner’s guide to RSS I take you on a guided tour of some of the great things RSS can do for you, whether you are interested in cutting through the glut of information swamping the web, or using RSS to help you in your blogging or independent business.

I walk you through:

• An RSS overview - giving you the basic facts about RSS
• Why RSS? - some reasons that you might find RSS useful in your everyday use of the web
• Where to find RSS on a website and how you can subscribe to the content you enjoy most
• The types of content that RSS can bring to your desktop or online “aggregator“
• How to gather your RSS feeds using a Feed Reader or Podcatcher
• Creating News Radars and Linkblogs - how you can use RSS to gather content from all over the web and create hand-picked news radars of content as a resource for your site visitors
• Creating an “ego radar”, a way of monitoring what people are saying about you and your content all over the web
• Creating a lifestream - an aggregated collection of your online publishing, from Flickr photos, to blog posts, YouTube videos and Twitter tweets
• Creating your own RSS feed - a simple way to make sure that people can syndicate and subscribe to your content
• Submitting your feed to RSS directories - how you can maximize your web exposure by making use of the huge list of RSS directories gathered together by Robin Good
• Feed scraping - how you can turn any website content into an RSS feed, even if it doesn’t supply a feed of its own
• Filtering, merging and refining RSS feeds - how you can refine the information you receive from an RSS feed to suit your exact needs

So pick and choose what you need, take what you are interested in, and enjoy using RSS to make navigating the endless ocean of web content a lot more precise and suited to your individual needs.

Here are the details:

RSS - Overview

RSS is a great, and simple, way for you to bring content from all over the web to easy to browse location - whether that’s a media player like iTunes or a “feed reader“, a kind of email inbox for the web.

Just like you might subscribe to the magazines or cable TV channels that interest you most, RSS allows you to subscribe to web content - be that news headlines, weather reports, podcasts or blog posts - and have that content delivered to you. No more visiting twenty different websites to check if they’ve been updated - with RSS, you are notified the minute new material arrives that might be of interest to you.

RSS has risen to become a standard way of syndicating and delivering web content, and you are likely to find the option of subscribing to an “RSS feed” for almost any blog, and many websites, photo sharing applications, video publishing destinations and a lot more besides.

This is made possible by a simple markup language called XML, but you don’t need to worry about technical details to make great use of RSS in making navigating the web and finding information a lot easier and a great deal more efficient.

Whether you want to get up-to-the-minute updates about stocks you’ve invested in, find out what bloggers and reviewers are writing about your business, or just create a custom filtered collection of the news that misses out all of the things you have no interest in, RSS can make a great deal of difference to how you use the web. In this guide I’ll show you how.

Why Use RSS?

Photo credit: Common Craft

The simplest reason to use RSS is that it is going to save you time.

If you visit more than a couple of websites, follow the pictures, videos and public profiles of your friends and colleagues, or want to keep up to date about the newest trends and changes in your industry, you already have a compelling number of reasons to put RSS to use.

Robin Good tracked down this great video that gives you the basics about why you might want to put RSS to use, created by Lee and Sachi LeFever of the Common Craft show. In this short and very entertaining video, you’ll get an at-a-glance idea as to why using RSS is going to save you a lot of time, and make navigating the saturation-point information on the web a lot less troublesome:

As you’ll have seen, using RSS to gather your favorite web content makes a lot of sense. It’s the difference between watching TV without a remote control - having to get up and switch channels manually - and quickly channel surfing with a remote control. Once you’ve made the jump, there’s no going back.

How Do I Find a RSS Feed On a Website?

The icon you’ll see most often for an RSS feed is an orange square with what looks like a white radio wave inside it. This is very often placed at the top of a website or blog, or next to a category or the title of a podcast or blog if you are browsing a directory.

You might also see the phrase “subscribe to my feed”, “RSS feed” or other variations, and just to confuse you may even see “XML” in the box. Some people might change the color of the icon, to further throw you off the scent, but if you recognize the shape, or see any of the above phrases used, chances are you can click through to subscribe to the content you’ve found.

If you’re using a modern browser like Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, Safari or Flock (to name a few) your browser may tell you when a website has a feed available for you by displaying the RSS symbol, or the word RSS right inside or next to your browser’s address bar (the place you type website addresses).

Depending on how you have your browser configured clicking on an RSS feed button will either subscribe within the browser’s own “feed reader”, or activate the subscription in your feed reader of choice - whether that’s on your desktop, or online.

If you want to take the RSS feed and manually place it in your feed reader, or save it for later, you simply have to right-click (control-click on a Mac) on the button and select “save link location”. This will then be copied to your clipboard, so that you can paste it wherever you like.

What Types of Content Can RSS Bring Me?

Photo credit: LoBoCo

RSS isn’t limited to just bringing blog posts to your feed reader. In fact, almost any type of web content can be syndicated using RSS. Think of it like a tube for sending information from one place to another - it doesn’t mind what that data is, so long as it has an RSS feed.

That means that you can subscribe to a friend’s collection of photos on Flickr, for instance, and every time your friend adds a new set of photos, you’ll receive them automatically in your feed reader. Or if you want to follow a particular Internet TV show or audio podcast, you can subscribe to its feed, and have the content automatically appear in iTunes, Miro or another “podcatcher” with similar capabilities.

RSS will happily transmit video, audio and even documents by placing them in what’s called an “enclosure“, which acts in a similar way to an email attachment. But while an attachment actually contains the full file, an enclosure simply provides a link to the content so that it can be downloaded by your feed reading software.

Just as you can subscribe to any of these types of content, then, it’s also relatively simple for you to syndicate any content you can think of with RSS. In short, if you follow or create web content with some degree of regularity, RSS is a great way of making sure that you - or your audience - gets the latest updates as soon as they go live.

In his excellent overview What Can You Do With RSS? Robin Good covers some of the further reaches of what it’s possible to use RSS for, including:

• Sharing calendars - using services like Google Calendar
• Tracking classified ads - like Craigslist
• Monitoring auctions - such as ebay
• And a lot more that you may not have considered possible with a simple RSS feed

How To Gather RSS Feeds Together

There are several ways of gathering all of your favorite content together with RSS, and these are roughly divided by function.

I have gathered here two of the most popular ways of collecting your RSS feeds - Feed Readers and Podcatchers:

Feed Readers

A Feed Reader is very much like an email inbox. Only instead of emails, the latest updates from the feeds you’ve subscribed to appear as their parent website is updated. These updates appear most commonly in reverse chronological order, again like an email application, with the latest at the top.

Just like Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail you can also sort the incoming information into folders to better organize your content, and have the option of viewing the latest items by the website they originated from (like sorting emails by sender), or as a “river of news”, flowing together and organized simply by the time that they were originally published.

If you compare this with surfing to different websites and manually checking for content, it quickly becomes apparent how convenient it is to have the content come directly to you. This way you can quickly scan through a great deal of information in a very short time, deciding if you’d like to read the full article, watch the full video, or listen to the full podcast, or move on to the next item in your list.

Whichever feed reader you decide to use - and there are a great many alternatives - you will see common features, such as a way of adding a new feed. To add a feed, you simply paste the RSS information you copied from a website feed icon into the appropriate dialog box, and click on subscribe. From then on, all of the latest content is updated in your feed reader.

Online Vs. Desktop Feed Readers

You can aggregate and read your web feeds from either an online feed reader, or one that you use from your desktop.

Online feed readers are a popular choice, given that you can access them from any computer, anywhere in the world, and still have access to your selection of RSS feeds. On the other hand, desktop readers don’t require you to launch your browser, work offline, and often have the benefits of an extended set of features.

If you decide to try an online feed reader perhaps the most popular choice is the free Google Reader, which is easy to use and can be accessed using the same Google sign-in as you would use for your Google Mail, Calendar or Documents accounts.

In the following short video Chris, one of the engineers for Google Reader, briefly explains the tool and how easy it is to use:

If you’d like to explore some of the alternatives for reading your feeds online, Frank Gruber has put together an excellent comparison of nine web-based feed reader applications for Tech Crunch.

For desktop feed readers the choice is equally wide, and Metacentric has compiled a extensive list of the possibilities.

My own favorite desktop feed reader is the excellent NetNewsWire for Macintosh, and I have heard great things about its Windows sibling Feed Demon. Both offer extensive feature-sets, but retain a simplicity and ease-of-use, and are relatively inexpensive.

Another excellent desktop feed reader, and one that works on Mac, Windows and Linux is Blogbridge. I reviewed version six of this simple but very powerful feed reading application recently, and found it to be an excellent solution, especially given that the reader itself is free.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that if you use the latest version of Apple Mail (Mac only) or Mozilla Thunderbird 2 (cross platform) that you already have a feed reader right inside your mail application. If you’d like to multi-task and have your information nicely gathered together, you might also consider giving these free options a spin.

Finally, a great many modern web browsers will allow you to subscribe to feeds right inside the browser itself. While the features are rather limited compared to a stand-alone feed reader, if you are only looking to subscribe to a small selection of news feeds, this might well prove sufficient for you. For superb integration of RSS feeds and other social media services, I highly recommend the free, cross-platform browser Flock.

Podcatchers

While a lot of the above-mentioned feed readers will also download media enclosures for you, the process is a little more complicated than if you use a specific tool called a “podcatcher“. A podcatcher is essentially a feed reader for media files, and most of the options available will have the capability to automatically download, organize and watch or listen to media files from a single application.

The two most popular options, besides the great many listed and compared at Podcatcher Matrix go slightly beyond the podcatcher functionality and actually present full media player capabilities - they are iTunes and Miro.

On the surface they present a similar set of features - directories of media content to choose podcasts from, instant downloading of the latest episodes for podcasts you have subscribed to, and the ability to categorize, file and watch your media from a single application.

However, in my humble opinion, Miro goes way further than iTunes in both its feature set and its commitment to supporting open standards and the open source ethos.

As I pointed out in my recent in-depth review of Miro, here is an open platform that makes it incredibly easy to search videos from YouTube and many other video sharing websites, download content via BitTorrent, and subscribe to thousands of podcast feeds from a well stocked directory, before watching your downloaded videos in a high definition, full screen player. This is an unbeatable combination.

Custom News Radars

Photo credit: Apple Motion Content

Robin Good’s concept of the News Radar has already been well documented, and has been described by News Radar professional Marjolein Hoekstra as:

“ …a constantly updated thematic channel of highly relevant web references that are gathered in accordance with specific, persistent search criteria. Radars can focus on anything: topics, people, opinions, products, news items, events or passions. The constant updating of the channel is accomplished by leveraging RSS technology to its full power.“

While the confines of this guide don’t give me space to go into a great deal of detail about the creation of news radars - keep your eyes peeled for a future guide - it might pay to briefly explore how you could begin to create a news radar, and why you might want to.

If you are running an independent online publishing company, or any other type of web-based business you will already doubtless spend a lot of time tracking the latest information in your industry, or within the subject niche of your blog. Whether that’s for the purposes of republishing your findings for an audience, or simply keeping abreast of the latest goings on, creating a custom news radar may very well prove to be a highly useful way of tracking this information.

To give you a concrete example, if you take a look at the left column of the Master New Media front page you’ll see Robin Good’s regularly updated selection of news items targeted to the interests of the readers of this website.

This is created by Robin subscribing to a number of web feeds on these key thematic concerns, including not only popular blogs, but also the RSS feeds gathered from social bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us, search results from blog search engines such as Google Blogsearch and a great many others.

Because while you can monitor a great many blogs and websites at once, the amount of signal to noise you receive might prove to be too much. When you consider that it is possible to subscribe to RSS feeds for specific search terms, suddenly the possibilities open up.

You can subscribe to a feed for all results for the search term “web 2.0 collaboration” at Google Blogsearch, for instance, and every time someone uses this term in their blog, you will receive an update from Google letting you know. This alone can be a very powerful way of monitoring the latest news in your content or business niche.

Once you have these results gathered, you can then easily publish them to the web for others to make use of using such services as the web widget Grazr, any number of simple RSS-to-HTML tools available, or simply by manually adding links to your blog from the most interesting news items that pass through your feed reader. This provides your readers with an excellent resource, and can attract a significant rise in web traffic if your selections prove to be useful and timely.

For more information about creating your own news radar, you might like to take a look at Rok Hrastnik’s interview with Robin Good about the process, or Marjolein Hoekstra’s breakdown of how she created a powerful news radar on the theme of podcasting professionals.

Ego Radars and Vanity Feeds

A very rudimentary form of news radar that can be very useful to both businesses and would-be professional bloggers is the “ego radar”, also known as a “vanity feed“.

This refers to the creation of a feed or series of feeds that monitor your name, the name of your product, or that of your company or blog.

While this might sound egotistical, it actually serves the very useful function of helping you to note and - crucially - respond to bloggers and other online publishers that are talking about you or your business.

So if someone is singing your praises, wishing that they could get some support for your service, or publicly criticizing your work, you will be the first to know and can make sure that you respond in a timely way.

To create a simple ego radar you might enter your name or whichever term you want to follow, using quotation marks, in Google Blog Search, Ask Blog Search, Technorati, Ice Rocket or even Google News if you are a newsworthy company.

For each search you run, you will be able to locate an RSS feed on the page,copy the RSS address, and bring this into your feed reader. From this point onwards, whenever you are talked about, you will be able to respond and enter into the conversation.

Darren Rowse of Problogger has written a great post on why you might want to create a vanity feed if this isn’t apparent, and even walks you through the process step-by-step.

Lifestreaming

If you use a number of online services, such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Last.fm, you may find over time that you’d like a simple way of gathering the media you share through these different tools in a single place.

This has become known as a “lifestream”, defined by Word Spy as:

“An online record of a person’s daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person’s online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos.“

There are now a number of ways to create a Lifestream, and among the most popular are Tumblr and Jaiku. If you’re interested in Jaiku, you can check out my Beginners Guide To Jaiku to get the bigger picture.

In short, what Jaiku and Tumblr both do is make it very easy for you to copy the feeds from your favorite social media services - Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, your blog, and so on, and aggregate all of your content together into a stream of information.

So every time you update your Facebook status, add some new pictures to Flickr, or write a blogpost, everything will be gathered in your Jaiku or Tumblr account. Your friends can even subscribe to your Jaiku or Tumblr RSS feed, so that they can follow all of your latest social media making from a single feed, right from their own feed reader.

In the following 30 second demo, Raj Dash shows you how to add the feed URL you have copied into Tumblr:

Creating Your Own RSS Feed

Many popular blogging platforms such as Wordpress, Movable Type or Blogger will automatically assign your blog with its own RSS feed. But if you aren’t sure where to find it, or want to keep tabs on how many people are subscribed to your content feed, the easiest thing is to create a feed using Feedburner.

All you have to do is type your URL into the box on the Feedburner frontpage and it will automatically discover and “burn” a Feedburner feed for you. You will then be prompted to create a “chicklet”, a little icon that people can click on, and given instructions on how to place this inside your blog or website template.

From then on you’ll be able to track how many people subscribe to your content, and make use of several other useful services, including optional updates. The basic Feedburner service is free.

The following short video from YouTube user Japhy Ryder walks you through creating your first Feedburner feed:

RSS Directories

If you are publishing to the web, you are more than likely preoccupied to some extent with gaining a wider audience. One way to extend the visibility of your blog or website is to submit its feed to an RSS Directory.

Directories gather RSS feeds together, allowing their site visitors to run searches by keyword, tags and categories. Obviously the more of these directories your website is listed at, the greater exposure it is likely to receive - thus driving more traffic to your content.

Far and away the easiest way of keeping up to date with the most current, and important, RSS directories out there is by making use of Robin Good’s RSS Top 55. This constantly updated list currently stands at some 223 entries, so will give you plenty to get stuck into if you are serious about getting your web content promoted far and wide.

Feed Scraping

Sometimes you’ll find a website that has no RSS feed, however hard you look, but does have the type of constantly updated information that would perfectly match RSS aggregation.

Luckily, it is possible to create a feed for a website that doesn’t have one - this process is called “feed scraping” and there are a number of services available that make this a relatively painless experience.

You can find excellent summaries of the various scraping tools on offer both here at Master New Media, and in Marshall Kirkpatrick’s thoughtful post on the matter.

While the three services covered in both posts - Feed43, Feedfire and FeedYes do have some key differences, they essentially perform a similar function.

You begin by entering the URL of the website you wish to “scrape”, and the services mentioned will then go away and find content that you might want to subscribe to. By selecting the key information and weeding out the unimportant items - such as menu information and metadata - you will finally be left with the part of the website of most interest to you.

Finally, you will be given an RSS feed which you can then bring into your feed reader to monitor the website in question without having to return directly to it in your browser for each update.

Filtering, Merging And Manipulating RSS Feeds

If you are processing a great deal of information, rather than a small selection of feeds, there may come a point at which you want to filter, merge or otherwise refine the content of your feeds.

At the simpler end of the scale, you can use the powerful features baked into Blogbridge to search for specific keywords within your incoming feeds, or to create “smart feeds” based on your selection of keywords. In both cases you can then filter through all of the information that appears in your feed reader “inbox” based on your own criteria. I wrote extensively about these great features in my recent review of Blogbridge 6.

For a greater degree of control, albeit a little bit at the cost of usability, there are few services that can hold a torch to MySyndicaat, which will allow you to use a vast variety of criteria for sorting through your incoming feed content.

Filtering by multiple keywords is just the tip of the iceberg, and MySyndicaat allows you to merge your feeds, create powerful news radars and publish the results to the web or as a new master feed. Robin Good reviewed this powerful tool in full back in 2005, and has been using it exclusively for a long time as his RSS tool of choice.

Somewhere between the two you’ll find the relatively easy to use, but nonetheless well featured Feed Digest which helps you to merge and filter your feeds by keywords, and also to generate ready-to-publish lists of your resulting feeds right on your website.

If you’re still looking for more ways to manipulate your RSS feeds, you might well enjoy taking a look at Robin’s selection of RSS Tools and Services, hand selected from his long-running Sharewood Picks series. Here you’ll find tools for:

• Scraping and creating custom RSS feeds from sites that do not have any
• Generating your own RSS feeds even if you don’t have a web site
• Mixing multiple RSS feeds into so-called news radars or master feeds
• Receiving your RSS feed subscribed content within your preferred instant messaging tool
• Converting RSS feeds in a variety of other formats
• Tracking and monitoring web pages changes via RSS
• Filtering RSS feeds from unwanted content
• Publishing an easy to access page that simplifies RSS readers subscriptions
• Generating serialized, cycling RSS feeds
• Future-publishing and scheduling RSS post for delayed delivery

As becomes quickly apparent from this list, it has only been possible to touch on the tip of the iceberg for this introductory guide to RSS. I hope you have a lot of fun discovering all of the ways that you can manipulate your own feeds to better serve your needs as you become more comfortable with RSS and its powerful capabilities.

Summary

RSS isn’t just for geeks. In fact, it can make both finding and publishing relevant and interesting content on the web a lot easier, in addition to providing another effective way of promoting your own online content - whether that’s in the form of a blog, podcast, or video show.

Essentially RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication“, is a simple way that you can receive updates from blogs, online news websites and other rich media as soon as they are published to the web. Rather than having to visit all of your favorite sites several times to see if any new content has been added, RSS brings the content to you the minute it goes live.

You can collect this content in a number of ways - the two most popular being feed readers for text-based content, and podcatchers (also known as media aggregators) for audio and visual content like podcasts and video shows. In both cases the simple tools involved resemble your email inbox - every time a new episode of a web tv show, or post from a blog, is published to the web, it appears in the top of your feed reader or podcatcher, just as a new email would in your inbox.

Subscribing to this content is push button simple, and it’s even possible to filter your “feeds” for keywords to narrow down the information that reaches you.

With RSS you can gather all of the information from the far corners of the web in one place, tailored to your specific interests and tastes. Whether you want to collect the latest stocks and shares forecasts, keep an eye on cheap flights and holiday deals, or filter the global news for articles that are likely to interest you, RSS can make a very big difference to the way you navigate the web.

And as you grow in your confidence, the possibilities of what you can achieve through RSS grow also. Suddenly what seemed like an arcane science suddenly opens up a powerful set of tools and strategies that you can use in your future business or publishing strategies.

Happy feed reading!

Additional Resources

If you’d like to read more about RSS, you might want to check out the following resources:

• Robin Good’s RSS Top 55
• Marjolein Hoekstra’s description of creating a professional news radar
• Marshall Kirkpatrick’s interesting post on how he used RSS as lead blogger for Tech Crunch
• The Beginner’s Guide To RSS from Small Office Australia
• What Is RSS? from the About.com Internet For Beginners site

Originally written by Michael Pick for Master New Media and titled “What Is RSS: A Guide To Really Simple Syndication Benefits, Best Uses And Applications”

Professional blogging is a huge growth area, and there are few people who wouldn\’t relish ditching the nine-to-five for a life writing about the things they love best. That\’s exactly what I did one year ago, when I joined Robin Good\’s Media Network. I haven\’t looked back since. A little less than a year ago I hadn\’t even considered the idea that I would be making my living by writing blog posts and making videos for the web. I was an active blogger, putting together various projects and writing about what inspired me, but I had no inclination that blogging would change my life in so many ways. I had worked all kinds of jobs, from HR recruitment to lecturing …

There are now a growing number of Internet video players and aggregators promising to bring the latest TV, movies and podcasts to your desktop. Most, however, rely on closed, proprietary technologies and place their viewers in a passive role. Not so with Miro, the newly re-branded Democracy Player. Miro is the new name for what was until recently Democracy Player, which was last reviewed late last year here at Master New Media. With a new look, a more cohesive website, some added features and a growing social community, Miro shows all of the signs of a good product that is going mainstream. This is the reason behind the name change, for instance, which was decided on to remove the political …

Mobile instant messaging tools have evolved rapidly in the first half of this year into always-on micro-blogging applications. But while Twitter might let you tell the world what you\’re doing, Jaiku goes a step further by serving as a mobile RSS aggregator. Creating an online presence and sharing it with friends is not only a great way of keeping in touch, but also an excellent means of promoting your business, website, blog or just yourself. Increasingly, however, we make use of a vast range of tools and services to manage our online media. We might upload our photos to Flickr, our videos to YouTube and post our current whereabouts using Dopplr or even Twitter. Which is all well and good, …