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:

§ Lightweight: This is a very important feature looked upon by many users as one of the reasons to prefer RSS tool. RSS is very small, in the sense - it requires less space, usually less than a hundred kilobytes of space. RSS files are XML documents, which can be written using any text editor (Word, notepad, emacs, vi etc) very easily.

§ Topical: RSS highlights what you think is important on your page and that would be the contents seen by the other readers. For example, if you are a news organization, you may want to focus on the latest headlines, if you are a businessperson you may want to showcase your products or if you are a publisher you may want to throw light on your latest book releases.

§ Metadata: Metadata is the information about your data. You can embed details about your data in your RSS file. For example, who wrote the article you are highlighting or how often your RSS file will be read to see if you have added any information.

§ Syndication: As we have already seen that it is to present a snapshot, in a specified formatted file, of what you consider most important about your site at the moment.

As a provider, the first step is to collect the latest news, announcements or any information you wish to give subscribers. Then you create 'RSS document', a summary of the collected information. The next step is to register the document with an RSS publisher. Once it is registered, anyone using an RSS reader can get it from the publisher or directly from your site.

About the author:

James McIntosh is the publisher of The Concept Development Newsletter http://www.conceptdevelopmentllc.com James has been a home based business development consultant for 23 years help his clients start and grow their businesses. This article may be reprinted with this resource box unchanged.