The RSS feed pandemic
The latest and hottest catchphrase in viral marketing and buzz-generation is RSS, aka 'webfeeds' (personally I prefer the latter, since it bypasses the unasnwerable debate over what the acronym RSS actually truely stands for). Yahoo! has been making a splash with its buttons that automatically add a site's RSS stream to a user's My Yahoo! page without their having to know a thing about how RSS actually works. In the past, all that you were likely to find was a trendy-looking orange button with "XML" or "RSS" in all-caps, and when you clicked on it you got the site's unique URL for its RSS feed, which was fine and good if you had an RSS aggregator/reader and knew how to use it. But if you did not, it could be a bit hair-raising.
To be truly VIRAL, of course, you want your RSS webfeed to be one-click accessible to site viewers, not give them a technology anxiety attack. So to me, "Add to My Yahoo!" RSS button makes a lot of sense, and it is brilliant viral marketing launch on the part of Yahoo!. That said, most sites still have (and should have) a traditional orange badge that lets users see the naked URL and lets them manually add it to the aggregator of their choice. To start signing up for RSS feeds to appear on a My Yahoo! page of your own creation, just go to My Yahoo! and sign up for a free account if you do not have one already. I recommend it if nothing else simply to keep tabs on what Yahoo! is doing with this service. For publishers, Yahoo! has created a page that will automatically generate a cut-and-paste html code using your own RSS URL that you can add to your site and offer your own visitors the option of adding your webfeed to their My Yahoo! page with one click (click here if interested).
To search specifically for RSS feeds that follow your interests, you can use Feedster. It is not pay-per-inclusion and I have found it to be reliable and useful, since the major engines still do not have RSS as one of their existing file-specific search options like images or PDF (though this is sure to change soon). Feedster also has a buzz index that allows you to type in a keyword and see the popularity of searches for RSS webfeeds related to it.
To be truly VIRAL, of course, you want your RSS webfeed to be one-click accessible to site viewers, not give them a technology anxiety attack. So to me, "Add to My Yahoo!" RSS button makes a lot of sense, and it is brilliant viral marketing launch on the part of Yahoo!. That said, most sites still have (and should have) a traditional orange badge that lets users see the naked URL and lets them manually add it to the aggregator of their choice. To start signing up for RSS feeds to appear on a My Yahoo! page of your own creation, just go to My Yahoo! and sign up for a free account if you do not have one already. I recommend it if nothing else simply to keep tabs on what Yahoo! is doing with this service. For publishers, Yahoo! has created a page that will automatically generate a cut-and-paste html code using your own RSS URL that you can add to your site and offer your own visitors the option of adding your webfeed to their My Yahoo! page with one click (click here if interested).
To search specifically for RSS feeds that follow your interests, you can use Feedster. It is not pay-per-inclusion and I have found it to be reliable and useful, since the major engines still do not have RSS as one of their existing file-specific search options like images or PDF (though this is sure to change soon). Feedster also has a buzz index that allows you to type in a keyword and see the popularity of searches for RSS webfeeds related to it.
posted by Boz at 9:14 AM
2 Comments:
Great post. May I also suggest you check out Technorati, which tracks over 5 million bloggers (only about 30% have RSS feeds) in real time, what they are saying, and who and where they are linking. Of course, I'm a bit biased, as I am the founder and CEO, but give us a try.
You can also subscribe to watchlists which give you up-to-the-minute info on what people are saying about you, your company, and things you are interested in...
Dave
Boz -- Thanks for the mention. You may also want to give us a shot on searching your blog itself -- http://feedster.com/builder.php?next=searchintro
Dave -- As of New Year's day, Feedster now indexes 3M RSS and ATOM feeds as soon as they are updated (the number is on the footer of every page). The number of feeds in our index is increasing anywhere from 40k to 80k per day with no end in sight. At least 80% of the feeds come from blogs, so your feed population number is low by at least a million. I suspect the real number of feeds is already close to 5 million and the number of blogs is close to 15 million. You and I both need to update our public messages on the population of blogs and feeds out there.
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