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12.15.05
From
RSS To My Media
 By
Jason Lee Miller
So far only 4 percent of those polled say they use RSS (really simple syndication).
Yahoo Senior Director of Personalization Products, Scott Gatz, says that number
should be closer to 27 percent, as many use RSS and don't know it. Yahoo began
publishing RSS feeds via Yahoo News and Yahoo Buzz back in 2003.
And really, the average user (the driving force of Web 2.0) doesn't need to know
the technicalities. RSS is lingua non-grata. "My Media," as Gatz and Yahoo call
it, is all they really need to know.
During his keynote address on RSS at the Syndicate
Conference in San Francisco, Gatz
gushed about the future of highly personalized and user-friendly syndication
subscription. iEntry Inc. CEO Rich Ord was in attendance and filled us in on what
was discussed.
The Web is growing exponentially, especially due to user-generated content. That
means the volume of available content is overwhelming. The next generation technologists
are producing ways to organize this content to make it easier to manage. Yahoo
is in the game providing not only RSS for text, but also for images, blogs, news
sources, and now even podcasts. Yesterday, Yahoo launched the MySubcription area
for podcasts, allowing users to subscribe to those feeds.
One might expect a progressive and trendy company such as Yahoo to be in the game
earlier. But other companies have begun participating as well. This week, WashingtonPost.com
launched their Congressional Votes Database, using a feed to put their brand in
front of customers on a regular basis.
Purina is using RSS for pet tips and expert Q&A, encouraging people to sign up
via media spots. Target is also using RSS, converting the ad circular to an online
format and distributing the latest bargains through RSS. These are useful features
that consumers understand.
The transition to My Media is led by email (something consumers already understand).
"We see email as the hub of consumers looking for information. So we updated Yahoo
Mail with more interactive features. One of the key things we did was to integrate
RSS feeds as a folder with the other mail folders. I can forward RSS posts just
like I do email. This is taking RSS to an even broader audience," said Gatz.
The key to creating a successful RSS campaign is making the information within
that campaign incredibly relevant to the consumer-and usually that involves less
of a sales pitch and more of nformation providing. Providing what consumers want,
when and where and how they want it helps create the ever-important viral effect
as information discovery becomes more social. If the information is useful to
one reader, then it's probably useful to a friend of their's.
About
the Author:
Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
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