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The Future of RSS is Not Blogs
notepage writes "Blogs vaulted RSS into the limelight but are unlikely to be the force that sustains RSS as a communication medium. The biggest opportunities for RSS are not in the blogosphere but as a corporate communication channel. Even now, businesses that were initially reluctantly evaluating RSS are beginning to realize the power and benefit of the RSS information avenue. The inherent capacity for consumers to select the content they wish to receive will be the driving mechanism for keeping advertisements to a minimum and content quality consistent."
> The inherent capacity for consumers to select the content they wish to receive
> will be the driving mechanism for keeping advertisements to a minimum and
> content quality consistent."
You sure? Between RSS feeds and Firefox's Adblock plug in I hardly see any adverts these days! Having said that, I'd like some way of having Firefox automatically select the `printer happy` version of a story, as they're entirely free of ads most of the time.
This is the old "push versus pull" marketing discussion. Are people tired of push communications, where their email inboxes fill up with garbage? Absolutely. But the real question is how to enact a "pull" distribution system that also sells stuff. The author seems to make the point for directly replacing newsletters and other corporate communications with RSS feeds. sounds good, but I don't think it's the complete picture. The basic problem is one of personality -- most corporate communications are about as personable as a TV commercial. Impersonal works great when you're mass-distributing the message, but from a pull standpoint I think the format and method of content creation will need to change, not just the technology. My two cents.
Robot Soccer Champions by 2050?
Wow -
I guess it's true, pop will eat itself. Remember when "push" internet was all the rage? Well, we all knew it wasn't really "push" at all, more like a periodic polling of "channels" of information. For a while there, Internet Explorer had a "channel subscription" feature. And there were all sorts of silly little news-ticker applets you could download and install, and then configure to pull various topics to you.
Hey wow look! It's a brand new wheel! It's round like the old one, and goes round and round like the old one.
The inherent capacity for consumers to select the content they wish to receive will be the driving mechanism for keeping advertisements to a minimum and content quality consistent.
Except that this is the opposite of what most media-driven corporations are about. They want you to see ALL the ads, to the point where they want to make it illegal to skip over them.
Typically, they don't care so much about the QUALITY of the content, but its CONSISTENCY. Any decent webfarm can do that.
Look at Coca-Cola or Pepsi or Sony. They want to bombard you with ads, over and over again, forever. They're not going to allow you to select only the ads with the hot chicks, or turn ads off after 9pm.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Something about this reminds me of the bad old days of Active Desktop and Netcaster, "push" technologies that were supposed to revolutionize the way people worked on the Internet - and quickly faded into obscurity.
Corporate RSS can work, but it needs to be less annoying than push technologies were. The problem is that once RSS gets integrated into Longhorn everyone and the dog will use it just like "push" technologies - "pushing" annoying ads into everyone's faces and "pushing" the signal to noise ratio down into nothingness.
keep advertising to a minimum? I think not. The best we can hope for is far more targetted ads...
You say that with resignation, like it's a bad thing. Would you rather that the people who actually produce all of the content that everyone wants have no way to cover the costs of their efforts, obtain health insurance, or go on a vacation once in a while? Everyone seems to want some ad-free, subscription-free paradise where they get all in the info and entertainment they could ever want, packaged up just for them, at no cost. It's not just that it's unrealistic, it's that it suggests a serious disconnect between the people that consume things and the realities of producing/distributing what they consume, and what it takes to allow talented, dedicated people to dedicate their waking hours to creating it. Targeted ads are probably one of the very best approaches to keeping the content producers happily producing without everything being subscription-based and/or DRMed past some threshold of pain. And the more targeted, the more likely it is to be the ideal mix for everyone involved.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So, the author (who sells RSS software) suggests that companies create PR/advertising feeds and that people will sign up for them? Interesting. Not very different from email lists except that customers could actually unsubscribe. Great for the customers, and legit opt-in businesses stop looking like spammers. I don't think I'll be signing up for them, but I'm sure someone will want to subscribe to Best Buy's marketing list.
But that's totally different than most blogs. Blogs are about self-publishing for people that don't create full websites. They're not for advertising a business unless the business can't afford a cheap webmaster.
Blogs as content sources and RSS as advertising feeds have totally different purposes. One won't replace the other, because they don't do the same thing.
And RSS won't help content publishers (like many bloggers and newspapers) because it circumvents advertising. Great for the customer, bad for the revenue stream. Unless you build so much trust and traffic through RSS that you get more traffic to your website. But how do you advertise the RSS feed to people that don't visit your website?
Personally, I don't see RSS being that revolutionary. But then I'm not selling it.
End rambling.
RSS can be quite useful for IT and other administrative notifications. My ISP, Pair, for example, uses RSS maintenance feeds to notify customers about about outages, maintenance, or other known problems.
RSS is serving as a vehicle for other communication mediums as well, like mailing lists and newsgroups. Gmane, another service that I use quite frequently, provides RSS feeds for their technical newsgroups.
And finally, RSS is already used by most major news agencies, such as Yahoo, the BBC, New Scientist, New York Times, and so on.
Titus Barik
Coming up on Slashdot: noted blog pundits and blogebrities alike blog their blogs out about this news that the blogosphere might be bloginalized! Blogs everywhere rise up in blogtest against this antiblog corporate movement to co-blog-opt RSS!
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Since the very beginning of advertising. Do you really think corporations enjoy throwing money away on advertising that isn't reaching their target audience or is otherwise ignored? If corporations can cut advertising costs by focusing their advertising dollars on those channels most likely to reach receptive consumers in their target audience, they'll jump at the chance.
Let's see--it's an article on how RSS is the future of business communication, hosted on a site that sells business RSS services, written by the site's owner, and submitted to Slashdot by the author.
Then fed to me via Slashdot's RSS feed.
Yep, that's the future of advertising via RSS if I ever saw it.
Speaking of RSS, I just made a voice RSS Browser yesterday. The source code is available to download and the program will let you turn just about any RSS feed into an IVR in less than a minute. http://www.pbxfreeware.org/
I agree. But it won't last.
With email spam, a business has your email address (think large opt-in companies rather than viagra selling spam worms). They can potentially use your email address to find out more about you - where you live, what you earn, and other demographic information. That lets them target ads to you. You get ads more likely to make you act the way they want you to.
With RSS feeds, they know nothing about you (except an IP address at best). They can't target you. They don't know who they are. If you don't come back to the feed because you drop your subscription, they don't know why... Actually, they don't even know that. They don't know what the turnover is. They have no way of gauging the effectiveness of the feed. They can tell how often it's accessed, but there's little to no accurate way they can tell what drives sales.
You can do that with email, just as you can with physical mail. You send one version to half of your accounts, and another version to the other half. Watch your sales and see who buys more.
Does anyone think big business will buy in to a model with no feedback for the long term?
If the [content providers] did not get revenue from advertising, if I didn't pay the [content providers] they would have to stop producing it so I would lose the use of the [content]. If I didn't value this [content] in the first place, as indicated by me not paying, I can't complain that it went away. If, however, I want it to stay, I should be willing to pay for it directly, not indirectly through "advertising tax".
Now, with advertising, who are [content providers] really serving? In a round-about way they are providing [content] to people, but if they lost advertising [revenue] they'd go out of business. So, in reality, these [content providers] are simply subcontracted advertisers, using [content] to get people to view ads. This is a disturbing business model, not because it doesn't work but because it allows people to get the idea that things are free. It's a great ruse by the Big Companies to have you pay to [see stuff] you want (the [content]) through a middle man (the Big Companies) while they (the middle men) take out a cut. It would be far more economically efficient to simply pay the [content provider] in the first place and cut out the middle man.
Note that I don't think the above discussion applies to informational websites by Big Companies about their own products; it is understood that part of their product or service is making you known about it. Now, if I went to, say, Intel's website to look up reference information for a chipset and had to see or block or whatever advertisements for Pepsi, I would seriously wonder about what is going on at Intel's web department.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Bear with me a second. There's already a movement underway to create "structured blogging" (which really needs a better name), and Microsoft already has a similar concept, where you attempt to state up front what is in an RSS item. So say that you're watching new movie releases at your local cinema, then you would be able to tell that each item might have title, stars, description, rating, and show times. It's really not hard to make that leap, it's the same argument people make now for the "Semantic Web" (and hopefully will be adopted quicker as we learn our lessons :)).
Great, so now I'm in a position to have a piece of software on my machine that is watching that feed for new movie releases. It sees that a new Shakespeare movie is opening this weekend, so it alerts me on my cell phone to this fact and asks for permission to go ahead and buy the tickets. Or maybe, if I have a properly enabled phone, it sends me a link where I can do it for myself. Like I said, this isn't going to happen tomorrow, but there's nothing technically stopping it.
Or how about a froogle watcher that keeps track of the average price on item X, and then knows that when it spots somebody offering more than 30% off that price, it goes ahead and buys it (again, or alerts me so I can do it). Even better, it spots it cheap, buys it and then immediately puts it up on ebay at a profit for automatic flipping.
Or a weather agent that sees, at 3am, that the hurricane has changed direction and is now headed straight for my hometown, so when I wake up at 7am there's a message waiting for me that maybe I should cancel my golf game.
Or a traffic monitoring agent that sees a truck has rolled over on Rt93 south, and tells my alarm clock to wake me up half an hour earlier so that I can take the backroads.
Is there anything special about RSS that enables any of what I just said? Nah, not really. It's more about the notion of polling information feeds and being able to automatically act on them. There's nothing new under the sun there. The question has always been one of technological adoption. You can't create the perfect technology and then tell the world "Why won't you use it!?! Use it now!" It has to prove itself, and grow over time. So if it takes going from blogs to RSS to Structured RSS to Smart Agents, I can wait.
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You make an interesting point, but your perspective is that of a singular entity - yourself. Marketing and Advertising both target groups. There is no such thing as individual marketing. As much as people like to pretend they are a unique snowflake, the fact is that they are all part of a target demographic, and if you know your demographic you can speak to them directly. The circulars you refer to are done with such frequency because they are cost effective. Now, you may throw them away, but at least 15 - 20% of the people who receive those mailings respond with a purchase of goods or services. The art for these circulars cost maybe $1000 from a freelancer, and that is VERY high. Add overpriced copywriting costs of another $1000. Send out 100,000 "postcards" with a printing and mailing cost of $5000, once again way overpriced. If the usual low end percentage of people respond, 15%, at a price point of $25 - then you have sold $375000 worth of product.
Now, lets break that $7000 dollar advertising cost down among the people who bought the product. Each person payed fifty cents extra for their $25 dollar product. That kinda savings is NOT going to inspire people to purchase a product. You will make more money by increasing the cost of a product marginally to increase the amount of sales more than you would by letting a product's cost speak for itself.Now, which is better for society: to institute advertising to convince people to become customers, or to use marketing to find out what types of products or services will gain you customers?
These are little off. Advertising is used to NOTIFY customers that a product is available, and perhaps educate them on the particulars of said product. Hopefully resulting in educating a person who would buy that product. Marketing is used to discern whether a product is profitably viable before it's made, to detirmine who the product's target is, and what are the most cost effective ways of genrating sales against that target.This having been said, nothing pisses me off more than when some asshat Marketing guy thinks he can use all his formulas and research to create a "super product." I got your super product right here, it's called water - and at a price point of ZERO everyone will want some.