Make sure you publish and promote your RSS/Atom feed
Posted by Patrick on March 24th, 2006
Since most people are not familiar with RSS and Atom, I think its best to get this post started with a definition.¬? According to About.com, content syndication is a blanket term used to refer to accessing and publishing web content (text, images, etc.) in one or both of these formats: RSS and Atom.
Web publishers (e.g., bloggers) can make their content available through syndication by using either RSS and/or Atom technology to produce what is known as ‘feeds’ (‘blog feeds’ or ‘news feeds’). These feeds can either show headlines only, headlines and summary, or full content. Many weblog systems/software incorporate content syndication as one of their features.
Syndicated content on the web are usually indicated with text links or graphic buttons that show the words RSS, Atom, XML, Syndicate, and/or Subscribe. They may be found on weblogs, websites, news sites, and other types of online content providers. Readers and/or fellow web publishers can access the latest updates of particular sites with content syndication when they use aggregators and/or feeds generators.
So why is RSS/Atom important to my corporate blog?¬? The main reason that RSS is important to business blogs is that many tech savvy people don?Äôt ?Äúvisit?Äù their favorite blogs on a daily basis by actually going to the blog?Äôs web page. They use a program or a service to subscribe to their favorite blogs?Äô (RSS) news feed and receive updated information.¬? It is easier to forget about a blog and never return than it is to unsubscribe to an RSS feed. Most respectable blog software has built-in support for RSS publishing. If the blog software/service that you are using doesn?Äôt support RSS publishing, then its time to find software that does.¬?
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on March 24th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
Good primer. understanding the underpinnings of syndicated content is certainly a must. I reccomend however leaving most of this to ‘feedburner’ which i use to syndicate my feeds. Most users don’t know they are using RSS (says a recent yahoo report) so I give them one option: feedburner.
I like that tool because it gives users the option of which feedreader to display on, and they don’t have to worry about which type of syndicated technology to use.
Soon, when IE7 and Outlook 12 are mainstream, the technology will not even matter. Kinda like how no one realizes they use SMTP every day (email)
on March 26th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Jeremiah, thanks for the kind words. I appreciate you dropping by and checking out my blog. I think I mentioned that I’ve just listening to the podcast roundtable – good stuff. You guys are doing a great job there.
Anyhow, back to your reply to my post. Its interesting that you bring up the Yahoo RSS survey as I alluded to that in my most recent post. There are two salient statistics: 1)Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS. 2)27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology. With this in mind I really think that you should be adding subscribe buttons for MyYahoo, MSN, etc. and not just one orange button for feedburner. In fact, feedburner has a great service that makes it easy to add these “chicklets” to your blog. You can find it when you log in to feedburner and then click on the “publicize” tab.