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: