contentious.com

I was just looking over the contentious-to-do topic in my Furl archive, and noticed that several of the items there are about webfeeds in one way or another. So I decided to throw them together into a special grab bag. (What’s Furl? What’s a webfeed?)

TOP OF THE LIST: RSS: Real advantage for marketing and PR, by Neville Hobson, Aug. 16. It seems I’m not the only person who’s talking about how businesses are really missing the boat with regard to webfeeds. (See my Feedless Hall of Shame.) This article addresses how businesses could be leveraging both weblogs and webfeeds to their advantage right now.

On webfeeds, Hobson writes, “The new reality is that blogs and RSS present a phenomenal opportunity to any organization to embrace these new communication channels and engage quickly, directly and effectively with customers, investors, partners and other audiences. If you can’t start a blog yet, the one thing you should do is RSS-enable the corporate PR and marketing information on your website – and get your press releases out via webfeeds as well as by traditional means. (I’ve yet to find any large company who offers open RSS webfeeds of their press releases from their websites.)”

Yeah. What he said.

Here’s the rest of this list…
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1. When will we get a Maureen Dowd RSS feed?, New Media Musings by JD Lasica, Aug. 16. OK, this is tooting my own horn a bit, but bear with me. In this article, Lasica discusses why he likes an idea I floated on the Poynter Institute’s Online-News discussion list (for online news industry professionals). I suggested that news organizations could provide webfeeds that announce fresh content from specific popular columnists, journalists, photographers, cartoonists, etc. This is something that virtually any news organization with an online presence could implement. In some cases, it might prove very popular. (If you’re a news organization interested in implementing webfeeds, that’s something with which JD or I could help you figure out.)
2. Fear of RSS, by Paul Scrivens, July 2, BusinessLogs. Many web site owners and online publishers are concerned that if they start offering webfeeds, site traffic will drop dramatically. A drop in site traffic can be particularly problematic where the business model relies primarily on web site advertising. Scrivens explains why this fear is misplaced, and why it’s holding online publishers back from a key opportunity to grow their audiences. (Thanks to PRblog for this link.)
3. A webfeed ad network? Cool! If you’re wondering what webfeeds might do for your business model, there’s always the possibility of putting ads in your webfeeds. Various online ad agencies, including Kanoodle, are actively working on this approach. An Aug. 27 article from Robb Interactive, More on RSS and Ads, goes into more detail about how a webfeed ad network might work. What I like about this idea is that it gives webfeed publishers the opportunity to match themselves with content-appropriate advertisers – something you can’t really do with Google Adsense unless you qualify for their premium service. (Your site must get 5 million search queries or 10 million content page views a month to qualify.) Webfeeds are all about customization, so why shouldn’t webfeed ads be all about customization? (Thanks to Small But Tough for this link.)
4. Fear of RSS, Part 2: Forbes Befuddled, from Pete Shinbach’s The Bach Door, Aug. 30. A rather less charitable view of news organizations that deride webfeeds. Shinbach writes, ” Is XML and RSS complicated? Sure it is but so’s programming a business magazine’s editorial computer software. Just as there’s no reason for a Forbes writer to know how his/her software is encoded, there’s no reason to know anything about XML, RSS, Atom or any other techno-alphabetized jargon. We don’t have to know how the thing works to be able to use it. It’s true with cars and it’s true with electronic communications devices.”
5. Feed Search: Where are the big boys? Recently there has been a spate of discussion and debate in the blogosphere over why major online search players such as Google are leaving the emerging field of webfeed searching to smaller players such as Feedster, Blogdigger, Technorati, and Bloglines. On Aug. 27 John Battelle published a good overview of this discussion, with many relevant links (especially The Daily Internet, from Topix.net). Worth reading. I’ll be following this discussion, participating in it, and commenting on it further in CONTENTIOUS. (Thanks to New Media Hack for this link.)
6. InfoSyndicate, a toolbar-based service that claims to be simpler alternative to webfeeds. I read about this in Email Newsletter Delivery Alternatives, by Jim Daniels. Daniels thinks webfeeds are too hard for most people to use and most publishers to implement. (I agree that this media channel is not as user-and publisher-friendly as it could be, but it’s not rocket science, either.) Anyway, he recommends this toolbar approach as a simpler way to access webfeed-like alerts via your web browser. I haven’t tried InfoSyndicate, but I think the idea of the toolbar (or sidebar) approach to managing webfeed subscriptions has potential. Who needs another application to install? From my perspective, the main drawback of InfoSyndicate is that this service only offers alerts to fresh content from its own handpicked group of publications. Also, it focuses strictly on internet marketing info – not my main area of interest. So I’ll doubt that I’ll try this service. But those of you who are into internet marketing info might want to give it a whirl. Let me know how well it works. (Thanks to Ben Prater for bringing this service to my attention.)
7. Urss toolbar for Mozilla: If, like me, you use the Mozilla or Firefox web browser and you like webfeeds, you might want to check out Urss. This browser plugin is a very simple feed reader that shows up as a toolbar in the browser, and displays webfeed content in the browser sidebar pane. Here’s what that looks like. Urss is probably a good solution for many people – and, of course, it’s free. I tried it and it worked fine, but I’m not using it because I couldn’t import my extensive existing feed list into it. Therefore it didn’t suit my particular needs, but it may work well for people who are new to webfeeds or who track a fairly short list of feeds. (Here’s why Bloglines is my preferred feed reader.)
8. What’s Wrong with Feed Readers? Plenty, according to this Aug. 25 rant from GlassDog. And I totally agree. I make no apologies for the current poor usability and functionality of many webfeed readers – but I think GlassDog has really nailed this topic. Excerpt: “The problem with feed readers has nothing to do with their basic functionality or their underlying protocols. It has everything to do with their author’s utter failure of imagination. The only thing that feed readers have managed to this point is put a pretty face on the raw data they receive. Golly. Thanks. Tell that 1973 green-screen sitting next to you I said hello.” Check out the link to 0xDecafBad – it’s a rather geeky but very intriguing article about how feed readers could be optimized for the needs of total “info freakos” (like, well, me) who aggregate hundreds of feeds in their personal feed reader. (Thanks to fellow E-Media Tidbits contributor Rich Gordon for the link to the GlassDog article.)
9. More mainstream media coverage of webfeeds. On July 15, the Baltimore Sun published an article by Tricia Bishop called The Internet funnel (free registration required). This is a practical backgrounder for a general audience which is unfamiliar with webfeeds and may not be very web-savvy. Probably a bit basic for many CONTENTIOUS readers, but it might be helpful to folks you know. Also, notice that the Sun publishes its own extensive list of webfeeds. Bishop’s article links to that feed index page at the end. I think it’s a good ide for any news organization that offers webfeeds to publish such a backgrounder article – it can not only educate your audience about feeds in general, but promote your own webfeeds.
10. Pully, Not Pushy, Internet Time blog, Aug. 20. Yet another example of someone explaining why they’re abandoning e-mail newsletter subscriptions in favor of webfeeds. But I’m actually noting this item here because of what the headline implies. Most people dislike encountering “pushiness,” whether in individuals or in media. Pushy media forces you to endure content that doesn’t interest you – like those obnoxious commercials they’re now playing in movie theaters before the previews and the feature film, or like poorly-designed e-learning that makes you wade sequentially through endless background material before getting to the point of the lesson. Webfeeds are pull-based – the publisher merely makes the feed file available online, and subscribers pull it down and review it at their leisure. That’s much more considerate toward the audience, I think. “Pully” – Yeah, I like it.