I recently came across a great article on The Future of RSS by Alek Iskold http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_rss.php. Alek discusses the possibility of adding more items to the standard RSS format in order to deliver a lot more information. Comments to his blog range from “I hope it happens to RSS” to “RSS was never intended for this level of information.”
As marketers, we should grasp any way we can get our information easily to our audience. While RSS is not new—it was created in 1995–the capability that it is providing to us is very exciting. I submit that the people who want RSS to stay as it is are technical people who don’t fully want to grasp the idea of feeding information to an audience in a quick, clean and fast fashion.
When I first started researching how Bulldog Solutions should use RSS, I realized to get the full understanding of the thing I had to use it in my day-to-day life. WOW! I couldn’t contain myself, I went grabbing for every feed I could. It changes the way that we learn. The constant bombardment, in a good way, of all the information from all of my sources turned my knowledge intake from deep reading into quick blurb shots. I kind of felt like the Matrix, to an extent, where tons of information is fed to you and you choose what you want to concentrate on and what is fluff.
Back to my marketing hat. If you are not using RSS feeds to get some level of information out to your audience, then you really are missing the boat. Even if it’s just letting your contacts know you have updates to your website or keeping your employees informed on the marketing departments activities.
My reply to Alek’s article was a definite “Bring on the Future”.
How are you using RSS to get a message out to an audience? Any unique messages?
-Jason
Comments
Post new comment