RSS feeds and how to use them
RSS feeds are the most important technology to arrive on the
internet since blogging, yet take up of RSS feeds among
webmasters and web visitors is still very low. The Sunday Times
recent ran a survey to see how home users use the internet , RSS
did not appear in it at all.
It's true that RSS is nowhere near as ubiquitous as email, but
email have been around since the beginning of the internet. RSS
and RSS feeds are relatively new to internet users. If you are a
webmaster you can benefit from this new technology that will
allow you to speak directly to your visitors and keep them
updated with what you are up to. You can get up to speed with
RSS feeds at http://www.newsniche.com/.
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According to Feedster, one of the largest RSS feed search
engines, there are over 9 million feeds in its index. RSS feeds
are a technology to be taken seriously, you can ignore it now
but you will find yourself way behind other webmasters when it
comes to the benefits of having your own feed.
To put RSS in context take a look at Bloglines, probably the
largest feed aggregator on the internet. When you subscribe to a
feed using Bloglines they tell you how many other of their
readers are subscribed to the same feed. Slashdot there more
subscribed to feed besides their own has about 35,000
subscribers to their RSS feed. Remember that's just other
Bloglines users so it only reflects a small percentage of their
total readers.
Let me take you through some of the benefits of having your own
RSS feed. If you take the example I just used for readers of the
Slashdot feed. Every time a new item is published to the RSS
feed it is available to every single subscriber immediately. You
are guaranteed that every reader will get the message whether
they choose to read it or not. If you done this with email you
would be lucky if a majority of your readers even received the
message due to spam filters and other obstacles.
Unlike email an RSS feed is zero maintenance. There is no list
of addresses to maintain, no server needed to send out your
messages, all you are doing is updating a file on your server.
There is no need to worry about being accused of spamming,
double opt in or adding to the spam problem.
I have left the best till last. You can even have detailed
statistics about your RSS feed by using a third party such as
Feedburner, all free. Feedburner will monitor the requests made
for your feed so you know how many readers you have and even
tell you which items have been clicked on. Plus Feedburner saves
you your valuable bandwidth and takes away any worries about the
compatibility of your RSS feed.
I have been publishing an RSS feed for several months, it has
worked so well that I have decided that I do not need the hassle
of an email newsletter. The only time I use email now is if I
want a personal conversation with someone, that's what email is
great at.