RSS and Blogging Are Not Kids’ Toys

February 01, 05 by

By Edahn Golan

Two interesting articles were published recently in two leading financial magazines regarding two technologies. The first one appeared in Fortune about blogging, the other about a perhaps little less known technology, yet possibly very relevant to us, was about RSS in Forbes.

Blogging is already a familiar word. Short for Web log, it started as the Internet version of the personal diary. Gone are the book pages, closed with a lock or tied with a ribbon. They are replaced by web pages with the twist of being public now, but that is only the start of what evolved into more then just a place for people to publish their musings and secret thoughts. Bloggers, people with a blog, include serious writers, scientist, artists and, lo and behold, public affairs agents.

Yes, you read it right. Companies are trying to make good use of this, too. Blogging is where much of the talk is being carried out today on the Net, and what turns the whole thing into a true web of information is a relatively old technology called RSS. Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a way of disseminating directly to subscribers’ desktops new entries on web pages. But these are not limited to blog entries; they also include articles and non-text items, such as pictures and even sound recordings. One hot new feature in third generation cell phones allows RSS to feed them too, all according to the subscriber’s own tastes and requests.

Look for this icon
for an RSS link

RSS is simple to use. Install an RSS reader (several good ones are available for free) and select your feeds of choice, such as the New York Times most emailed articles or its Business section or one of Forbes’ 43 feeds, and voila - you get a link to the new items sent to you as they go online. Look for a small, usually orange, square with RSS or XML written in it on web pages to add as a feed.

Entitled “A toy for bloggers could disrupt real Web businesses”, the Forbes article details how businesses can actually benefit from these two, basically free, tools. Amazon is now offering resellers automatic updates by RSS, while an eBay competitor, Palo Alto-based LiveDeal, is streaming item listings to users, saving them from the need to come back to see what is new. A business can count on the passive ‘action’ of users much more than on their active behavior.

But disruptions can happen. Back to blogging - when someone is unhappy with a product and writes about it in his or her blog, with the help of RSS the information spreads faster than a fire on a dry California mountainside. Within an hour, hundreds of other sites might be posting a link to the entry and thousands, if not tens of thousands, can be exposed to what can be a major PR headache.

This is why firms like Toyota and Microsoft have harnessed the technology. They can not only quietly spread news with blogs that they run while concealing their identity (bad idea - it eventually gets leaked out), they also use official and employee blogs as a way to receive information from the public and deal quickly with problems.

I’ll spare you the examples. By all means check out the two articles (links below). They are eye-openers as to how blogging and has RSS affected major companies.

Besides strongly recommending you subscribe to RSS feeds, I would also like to suggest that we also use it to our benefit. If you have a business-to-business website, why not use the RSS technology to allow your clients to receive regular updates on your offerings, new campaigns, even company news? If you run a business-to-consumer site, offer users updates like LiveDeal or update them on new store locations. Why not use it to send clients links to articles that you think they’ll find an interest in as a service? This will complement both your PR and marketing efforts. The sky is the limit.

Keep those emails coming in. If you have a question, suggestion or a comment to make, by all means drop me a line at: edahn at idexonline.com.

LINKS

Articles:

Forbes article on RSS:

tinyurl.com/5dnks

Fortune’s blogs article:

RSS Software:

RSS Feeds: