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."

ISP, News, and more.

[barik]

RSS can be quite useful for IT and other administrative notifications. My ISP, Pair [pair.com], for example, uses RSS maintenance feeds [pair.com] 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 [gmane.org], 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 [bbc.co.uk], New Scientist, New York Times, and so on.

Atom may ultimately be more attractive

[Mordant]

for automated publish/subscribe models because it's an actual standard [ietf.org].

BLOGOSPHERE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg your pardon, but the proper term is "Blogiverse"!

These blogheads don't even bloggin know how to be bloggin clever when making up bloggin buzzwords.

To blog with it all.

Re:This post brought to you by my sponsor

[Irish_Samurai]

I basically throw out every circular I get in the mail - I'm talking print material that I get at least 4 out of the 6 days mail comes in a week. In my mind, this is a great waste of paper and energy to produce, as those circulars will not get me to buy any more than I would have without them (they might, at best, get me to purchase a certain brand over another with a coupon - if I were already planning on making a purchase).

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.

Re:Advertising

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

I'd give it a few days before installing Greasemonkey.

"Yesterday, Mark Pilgrim discovered and announced a very serious security vulnerability in Greasemonkey."

http://greaseblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/mandatory-g reasemonkey-update.html [blogspot.com]