Blog Posts About: RSS Atom and Syndication

I’ve written before that I love reading my RSS feeds, but I often get behind and end up missing a lot. The more I think about it, it’s like the morning newspaper. It appears in the morning and is packed with interesting information that could benefit me during the day. But, if the newspaper goes straight to recycle bin, I experience no pain.

The big point here is that reading RSS feeds can be a positive, but missing them doesn’t create a negative, for me at least. Yesterday’s news is yesterday’s news.

I wonder if this will be the role of RSS in the future, or if it will start to move to more into the realm of the mailed letter, where it hurts to miss it?

Kathleen Gilroy posted recently about a vision of the future of RSS:

Imagine a universal portal (public or internal for corporate use) that does nothing more than help people to collect feeds that will help them learn about subjects they care about.

I think she’s onto something and I’ll relate her point to a project I’m working on now:

I’m working with a start-up called mpire here in Seattle. Mpire is building an online application that makes life easier for small businesses that use eBay. I’m working with them on their blog strategy and support forums.

One of the priorities we’ve outlined is to get them up to speed on the blog world and RSS. So, I set out to find all the eBay-related blogs I could find. Then, I created a NewsGator Online account for them and subscribed to all the eBay blogs, along with some other feeds and sent them the login.

This was a way for me to provide them a look at the kind of information they could track using blogs and RSS. It’s just step one.

The Opportunity

This process of creating a customized set of RSS feeds that focus on a particular niche really seems like an opportunity, particularly in the future. The mpire example is an example of what virtually every business should be doing -- keeping up with the “conversation�? that’s happening right now.

Often, businesses don’t know there IS a conversation going on, much less how to be aware of it. I see an opportunity for a service that could provide businesses with custom packages of RSS feeds for their area of focus. The packages might include feeds from:

• Pertinent blogs (including competitors blogs)
• PubSub for terms matching product, company and executive names (perhaps even followed by the word “sucksâ€??)
• Links to their sites from Technorati
• Related del.icio.us bookmark tags
• Industry news sources

This sort of packaged RSS aggregation would enable a one-stop shop for businesses wanting to get started with RSS and blogging, but not knowing where to start.

Of course, as Murphy’s Law would have it- it’s time for you, dear reader, to tell me about the myriad companies already doing this…

I’ve posted before about trying to figure out how to manage all my RSS feeds (read the comments) . Unfortunately I don’t get paid to read them and when I get busy, they build up, making me feel like I’m missing something. They mock me, those feeds, I swear.

I really want to keep up because it makes me aware and more informed. When they build up, I just nuke the whole bunch and start from scratch. Blowing off a few days of feeds makes me feel guilty and a bit liberated at the same time. This was the case when I returned from a couple of days off recently.

One strategy that has helped is to check the feeds multiple times during the day. Since I’m a bit spastic with my online behavior anyway, it fits for me to check feeds in the 2 minutes before a conference call, for instance. I drop in and look at the new stuff and clear the backlog. Doing this helps me keep up with the flow in short bursts.

For me, this all comes down to “flow management�? – the ability to manage the constant flow of information emerging from blogs, message boards and sites like PubSub via RSS (which is rocket fuel for flow).

In the future, developing a style and strategy of managing the flow is going to be a required skill. Those who do it well may have an advantage over others by being able to extract valuable nuggets of information from a flood of feeds and notifications.

I'm keeping my head above water for now, but I've got a long way to go and I see more and more flow coming my way every day. Maybe its time to get a snorkel.

Chris is saying that there is bigger news that Google's recent announcement about site-targeted ads. He sees evidence of Adsense in RSS feeds... This could be big...

So I’m convinced that RSS is taking over the online world. I think there are two types of Internet users, those who use some type of RSS aggregator and those who will.

I personally use NewsGator Online and I subscribe to 75 feeds, which is not a lot by some standards and I’m talking to you Scoble.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how I can become a better RSS reader. With all this information emerging, how can I understand/organize/use RSS in a way that maximizes its potential? I feel like I’m missing something.

Right now, I just have a list of all the feeds with no real organizational structure. A couple of times a day, I read through everything if I have time. If I can’t read for a couple of days, I just clear everything and start over fresh. Sophisticated huh?

I’ve gravitated to subscribing to people I’ve actually met- it helps me filter the noise. Also, I’ve started using feeds for things like events in Seattle, PubSub Subscriptions, Flickr Tags and 43 Things Goals (as opposed to purely subscribing to blog posts).

What’s your RSS reading strategy? What advice do you have for maximizing your reading?

A new company called Nooked is creating a (beta) directory of corporate RSS feeds. The basic premise is that companies will be publishing news more and more using RSS. As RSS publishing becomes a standard over the next couple of years, Nooked hopes to be the source for finding and organizing RSS feeds for companies and industries you’d like to watch.

Here are some first impressions...

I like the idea. It's a bit of a crap shoot right now to find RSS feeds for companies and industries without clicking around the web. The niche is there.

The language on the public site is mostly free from techno-babble (which I dig).

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) lets you publish your news and corporate information in a format that can be accessed by anyone over the Internet. RSS is published in feeds or channels, and is read using a new category of software called news aggregators.

On day one of the 14 day trial I’ve found the web interface for members is a little clunky and short on relating how the system is supposed to be used. The site could benefit from usability testing. For instance, after logging in, I can "create an entry", but have no idea what an entry is, or why I would want to create one.

If Nooked can do a better job of making it forehead-smackingly easy for companies to get started and understand the features and benefits in future versions, they could be a contender.