RSS the Future of Internet Marketing? Part 2of 4
RSS the Future of Internet Marketing? Part 2of4 By James McIntosh
Before knowing about the latest trendsetter RSS, let us discuss
in length about the current demerits faced by the organizations
planning to offer e-mails or e-newsletters to their subscribers.
The organizations are meeting a great challenge to catch the
attention of their subscribers.
The users have second thoughts signing up, due to the junk mails
flooding their mailboxes. Even if they do sign in, the question
of whether these mails draw their attention pops up! With the
technology world pacing through unimaginable changes each and
every minute, one needs to know how precious time is. Users
definitely may not want to even bother to open such mails, lest
to read it.
With spam gaining momentum by the day, the question of mere
survival of the organizations' mass deletion system hovers as a
big challenge.
Now, people or precisely, organizations, resort to better,
flexible methods of communications. Obviously, with the enormous
growth in technology, especially in the Internet, there is a
need to switch over to more interesting ways of communicating to
the subscribers. Especially companies with a smaller advertising
budget need to be innovative in their ways of communication
through web. This is where 'push-based' communications methods
such as RSS come in.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.
It can be simply explained as a file containing the latest
headlines, which can be published and subscribed to easily.
Major players such as Macromedia, Macromedia, Blue Cross Blue
Shield, and IDC have begun going in for RSS, not for just
effective communication, but also for augmenting visibility of
their websites, thus increasing traffic to their sites. End of
the day, these organizations update their customers without
worrying about 'mass deletion'!
Before going in depth about Really Simple Syndication, knowing
what RSS is will give us a vivid picture of this new technology.
We can define RSS more technically as a lightweight, topical,
metadata and syndication format. Let us look into each feature
to get a vivid picture:
§ Lightweight: This is a very important feature looked upon by
many users as one of the reasons to prefer RSS tool. RSS is very
small, in the sense - it requires less space, usually less than
a hundred kilobytes of space. RSS files are XML documents, which
can be written using any text editor (Word, notepad, emacs, vi
etc) very easily.
§ Topical: RSS highlights what you think is important on your
page and that would be the contents seen by the other readers.
For example, if you are a news organization, you may want to
focus on the latest headlines, if you are a businessperson you
may want to showcase your products or if you are a publisher you
may want to throw light on your latest book releases.
§ Metadata: Metadata is the information about your data. You can
embed details about your data in your RSS file. For example, who
wrote the article you are highlighting or how often your RSS
file will be read to see if you have added any information.
§ Syndication: As we have already seen that it is to present a
snapshot, in a specified formatted file, of what you consider
most important about your site at the moment.
As a provider, the first step is to collect the latest news,
announcements or any information you wish to give subscribers.
Then you create 'RSS document', a summary of the collected
information. The next step is to register the document with an
RSS publisher. Once it is registered, anyone using an RSS reader
can get it from the publisher or directly from your site.
About the author:
James McIntosh is the publisher of The Concept Development
Newsletter http://www.conceptdevelopmentllc.com James has been a
home based business development consultant for 23 years help his
clients start and grow their businesses. This article may be
reprinted with this resource box unchanged.
Written By: James McIntosh