A reader recently commented that it would be handy to be alerted, rather than having to check, whenever a new post appears on my blog. As many of you know, I’m a big fan of RSS. For the uninitiated, RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a technology that enables you to subscribe to a Web site in order to be notified whenever new content is published. RSS content is called a “feed,” and can be read using software called an “RSS aggregator” or “feed reader.” As you might have guessed, this Web site supports RSS.

There are several ways you can subscribe to my RSS feed, which automatically delivers each new headline and blog posting to you in full.

To subscribe using an RSS aggregator or feed reader application:

• Click the orange “XML” button that appears near the top of this blog.
• Copy the URL of the page that appears from the browser address bar (http://feeds.feedburner.com/QuietRevolutionInEmailMarketing).
• Paste the copied URL into your existing RSS feed reader. Or, if your RSS feed reader appears as a one-click button or in the drop-down list on my RSS feed page, you can select it there to use the one-click feature to add my feed.

RSS has also been integrated into Gmail, iGoogle and Outlook 2007. To subscribe directly from these applications:

• In Gmail: Click “Settings.” Click “Web Clips.” In “Search by Topic or URL” box, paste the URL of the RSS feed. Click “Search.” Click “Add.”
• In iGoogle: Click “Add Stuff.” Click “Add RSS Feed.” Paste the URL of the RSS feed.
• In Outlook 2007: You can find the instructions for adding RSS feeds to Outlook at this Microsoft Office Online Web page.

If you’re not yet using RSS, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s a fabulous way to stay up-to-date with all your favorite news, blogs and any other Web sites you follow that offer updates via this exciting and convenient technology.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I managed to sneak in a great two-week vacation this summer, but my blog posting frequency dropped off a bit. Not to fear, I'm back now and my blogging will once again be streaming forth across cyberspace <grin>.

TechCrunch, a group-edited blog about new Internet products and technologies, referenced a blog posting by the author of RSS Dave Winer on how social networking Web site Facebook has quietly started putting RSS into its pages. What's cool is that this is not your garden variety RSS, but full-out iRSS (individualized RSS). The new features let Facebook users track the status of their friends without having to log in first. If you really want to know whether Rachel is back from vacation or if Danny is having a good day, have no fear, RSS will make it easy to get this information anywhere, anytime.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Feedburner, one of the earliest players in the RSS world and one of the most well known, was recently purchased by Google.

You can read the first-hand account in the official Feedburner blog.

This is a huge endorsement for RSS.

Between Microsoft's strong support for RSS in Outlook and Vista, coupled with Google's endorsement of RSS via FeedBurner, this exciting new medium is going to see a surge of attention and usage in the coming year.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A recently released report from Forrester Research shows a sharp rise in the use of RSS among marketers.

According to the report, "Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch in 2007," 40 percent of marketers surveyed by analyst firm in December and January say they will use or test RSS this year, up from just 10 percent last year. The reason? Marketers are seeing proof that the emerging channel works. Forrester recommends that marketers start adopting RSS now in order to keep up with their customers who already actively use the emerging technology.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I wanted to take a quick pulse on the world of RSS and marketing. How is it doing? What's its future?

eMarketer recently published an article that suggested that RSS is much-ado-about-nothing: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004127

It's surprising to me how often the low consumer awareness of RSS is used to suggest that RSS isn't being used. Most consumers have no idea what SMTP, HTTP and SSL are but that doesn't stop them from using email, surfing the web or buying things online. The fact is awareness does not equal adoption. We've all read last October's Yahoo!/Ipsos study (PDF) . Even though it's a bit out date now, it highlights the fact that consumers' adoption of RSS is well beyond their awareness.

A more upbeat view of RSS comes from Rebecca Lieb's recent Sept. 8 column in ClickZ. She cites a wide range of innovative uses of RSS. Her list blew me away in terms of the diversity and innovation of some of these applications. Without a doubt, RSS is a key component of a lot of innovation that is going on across the country. As consumers adopt RSS (even if they don't know they are doing so because they use Yahoo! or Google or Outlook) to get at these innovative feeds, their ability to be marketed to through those feeds and others will only increase.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Jupiter recently released another study on RSS entitled, "RSS Comes of Age" - it really caught my attention.

While it sounds like self-reported usage of RSS users is fairly low (below 5%), the rate at which sites are adopting RSS is occuring at an astonishing rate.

They polled several hundred popular sites to find out their plans for RSS. Sixty-three percent (63%) of large companies plan to introduce RSS within 2006! Seventy-one percent (71%) of those plan on spending over $50,000 and 23% plan on spending over $1 million.

These numbers are amazing and even if they are double the actual 2006 deployments, there's no question that RSS content will soon be flooding the internet. To be clear, the study doesn't differentiate between RSS publishing, marketing, service, etc. However, the fact remains that RSS content will be available from a majority of well trafficed web site in a year or less.

RSS is exploding onto the landcape - readers are appearing everywhere from Google Mail and My Yahoo to Microsoft Vista and the next version of Outlook. And, from Jupiter's report, the content world is embracing RSS just as quickly.

There is a brand new internet channel being born. Even if only a fraction of the users know the name of RSS, they will all be using it before you know it.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

RSS is going to be big.

I have been a true believer for a long time. And, apparently, the rest of the world is starting to get in line with this thinking. You can't turn around without hearing about blogs or RSS these days. These topics are no longer confined to niche news or trade media.

Over the coming months, I am going to start talking more and more about RSS - both its opportunities and its challenges.

To kick things off, let me focus in on one of its most interesting challenges. The little orange box. You know the one, it says XML or RSS. Microsoft has created quite an uproar as they've started talking about changing the icon yet again. Blogger Ed Bott was quoted in Microsoft Watch and hit the nail on the head. He pointed out that the real problem isn't the choice of button but: what happens when a novice user actually CLICKS on that button?

In case you haven't tried it, you generally get XML code. Since the average consumer can't tell XML code from a mainframe core dump, the only thing a consumer learns about the XML button is: DONT TOUCH IT!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem we need to address. And, even for sophisticated users as well as cutting edge marketers, the problem isn't any easier. What if the customer is using one of the web-based RSS readers that has its own little icon like +MyYahoo, +MyMSN, Bloglines, Pluck, etc., etc., etc? How many icons do you display? Which ones are most popular? How many are too many? You get the idea.

I've seen some discussions on approaches to unify this including some nice JavaScript used by companies trying to support multiple RSS readers but none of the approaches seem simple enough for novices. If any of you have ideas on this, please send them my way.

You'll see a lot more about my interest in RSS very shortly. In the mean time, I am super-excited about RSS and topics like this are near and dear to my heart.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 06:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As a long time consumer of The New York Times' RSS feeds, I was delighted to see just how successful it has been for them. According to this article, over the twelve month period of March 2004 to March 2005, The NYTimes saw a 342% increase in page views associated with RSS feeds. Given that a large number of people (like me) probably just scan the summaries and only read a fraction of the articles, I suspect the actual impact their RSS program is much higher.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A friend of mine passed along this interesting piece of news: a new venture fund has been started exclusively to invest in RSS based businesses.

Even though RSS is a game-changing idea, having spent several years as a venture capitalist, I'm not sure an RSS fund is a slam dunk idea. The value proposition behind blogs, for example, are very media-related where as the benefit of RSS publishing systems tend to be software-related. In other words, RSS does indeed pull together a whole range of benefits, but most of the benefits have dramatically different value propositions. To put it another way, an RSS fund is somewhat like an SMTP fund - you could be investing in Lotus Notes, email marketing or Mozilla email clients.

Despite my questions about RSS as an investment thesis, I applaud the founding partners for putting their money behind something that is clearly going to drive significant change in business and the media. And, as a huge believer in all things RSS, I wish them tremendous success.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Blogging is a wonderfully confusing concept. It is important to point out that the world of blogging really exists on several different levels.

The first level is technical. Blogs are simple text or multimedia articles that are written and stored in a way that is easily organized and accessed.

The second level is also technical but it is about distribution. While early blogs were largely delivered via web sites, the power of blogs drove the adoption of several new technology protocols like RSS and Atom (more on this later). These protocols are somewhat like HTTP and HTML that power the web itself.

The last level, the one that disrupts presidential elections and gives us first hand views on natural disasters, is really a social phenomenon. The technology underlying blogs is powerful, widely available, easy to use and generally free. As a result, there are absolutely no barriers for someone that wants to be a published blog author. Anyone can create and publish a blog and many people have decided to do so. All of a sudden, content like news or editorials are no longer limited to the major media outlets like newspapers, TVs and books. The world is suddenly flooded with hundreds of thousands of authors, each with their own opinions or expertise. Because anyone with internet access can read any blog, no matter where it was written or who it was posted by, we have seen a complete democratization of opinion almost over night.

I can't begin to predict how blogging will evolve but it will most certainly change the power structure of the news media and, most importantly to us, it will be yet another change agent driving the quiet revolution in online marketing.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 07:51 PM | Permalink

2005 is the year of the blog.

Blogs are everywhere. You can read blogs on the Iraq war written by people living in the midst of it all in Iraq (get a list from http://jarrarsupariver.blogspot.com/). The first real insights from the tsunami came from local bloggers (check out http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/). You can read blogs about blogs. And, last but not least, even Bill Nussey has a blog (you're reading it).

According to the recent study from Pew Internet & American Life Research, blog readership was up 58% in 2004 over 2003 and that 27% of all Internet users (or 23 million people) have read a blog in the last year. Given all this, it's not surprising that 2005 is being declared the year of the blog.

What exactly is a blog? A robust definition is available at my favorite site for all things internet, Wikipedia. But, in a nutshell, 'blog' is short for 'web log' - it is a web page where an author posts periodic articles on a particular topic. The original blogs had a decidedly personal, almost diary-like, tone. Blogs have evolved rapidly, however. Many now include music or pictures. Search engines dedicated to blogs have sprung up (more on this later). And, in the last year or so, blogs have also broadened to include business-oriented communications (like this blog).

It is this last point that is most crucial to the world of marketing. If blogs can influence presidential elections, they can most certainly speak to and possibly influence attitudes towards products and services offered by businesses. It follows that blogs will certainly become a tool, if not a key tool, for marketers in the coming years.

I'll be posting additional entries on how blogs work so keep checking the site and your RSS readers.

Posted by Bill Nussey at 07:05 PM | Permalink