Archive for April, 2006

The guys at Emerson Process Experts have created a must read RSS Starter Kit. RSS is a life changing technology people. Get on the bandwagon.

What is RSS?

RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, lets you receive instant information updates. With RSS webfeeds you are in control — you decide what you want to read and when you want to read it. A simple news reader makes this possible.

Once you subscribe to a site’s RSS webfeed or even a search engine feed, your news reader goes out and grabs the updated information saving you the time it takes to visit each site. The latest information as soon as it is published comes to your news reader.

Major news sites, blogs, and a growing number of corporate websites publish their content as RSS webfeeds. Millions of sites such as BBC World News, The New York Times, and EasyDeltaV.com use RSS to deliver headlines and summaries.

Some browsers like Firefox automatically check for webfeeds when you visit a website, and display this icon when it finds one. This auto discovery will be in the next Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office releases.

Why use RSS?

One of the blogs that I follow on a regular basis is Dave Winer’s. The man is a blogging legend.¬? Dave recently had a blog post that so succinctly stated why Corporate Blogging is so important.

I’ve been following the mixup over Scoble’s meeting at Amazon, from a distance. The guy from Amazon apparently asked Scoble to cut the bullshit and tell him why he should be interested in blogs. If I had been there I would have said that blogging is now an expected channel of communication with at least some customers, with developers and the press. Amazon has customers, and presumably wants more. And they have a developer pitch too, and they have stories they want to communicate to the press. So if some of the people you want to reach like to receive information via RSS and blogs, why would you not want to provide it? To me, asking why you should use blogs is like asking why you should answer the phone. It might be a customer, a developer who wants to use your services, or a reporter who wants to write about the company. Your competitors answer the phone, so you should too.