Tuesday, January 18, 2005
HC+T Update—Special Issue: RSS
A special issue of the monthly e-mail newsletter from Shel Holtz, ABC.
HC+T Update
January 2005
Special Issue: RSS
In This Issue:
1. Why A Special Issue On RSS?
2. What Is RSS?
3. How To Use RSS
4. Newsreaders
5. RSS-Related Software
6. More Information And Resources
7. These Are A Few Of My Favorite Feeds
8. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
1. Why A Special Issue On RSS?
Over the last couple months, more than a few readers have commented to me that they’re losing interest in HC+T Update based on my ongoing reporting of new communication tools including blogs, wikis, and RSS. One e-mail commented that I’m too far ahead of the curve for most people working in the day-to-day world of organizational communication.
I’m worried by these observations. I don’t think I’m far out in front of the curve. I fear communicators are too far behind the curve. Consider these applications of RSS in the real world:
- CNN has just launched a series of RSS feeds on its Web site. The feeds are prominently located on the CNN home page.
- The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are among major media outlets providing RSS feeds. Amazon is also offering feeds, along with MSN Music.
- Firefox, the browser threatening Internet Explorer’s dominance, has RSS subscription capabilities built into it.
- Yahoo!, the most popular online consumer destination, offers several feeds, including feeds from its news service and even its hot site of the day feature.
- RSS is being used commercially by business ranging from travel to auctions.
- In the public sector, everyone from local churches to local governments is starting to offer RSS feeds.
- Reporters, overwhelmed by e-mail, are turning to RSS feeds from PR agencies for their story pitches.
- Companies like Nooked (http://www.nooked.com) offers RSS services to corporations specifically for new purposes. Nooked’s tagline: “Rescuing Corporate Communications: Manage, create, publish and measure your news with RSS.”
Add to this mix the efforts of some tech companies to develop event-driven RSS (designed specifically for internal communications purposes) and RSS-specific servers. What do you get? The fact that RSS has arrived. It’s here. It’s being adopted by a rapidly expanding number of our audience members. It’s not a future technology. It’s a current technology that the PR and communications community has been slow to embrace.
This special edition of HC+T Update focuses on RSS in the hopes that readers who haven’t adopted it yet will start looking at it more seriously. I certainly don’t mean this as an insult to RSS-less communicators. I certainly recognize that we get lower budgets that our advertising and marketing brethren, that we have smaller staffs, and that we have less time to explore new channels.
But a little push never hurt anybody.
2. What Is RSS?
In suggesting that I produce this special RSS-focused issue, reader and friend Bill Boyd wrote, “If you can convince readers that subscribing to RSS is easy and get them to actually do it, I’m sure they’ll find it as valuable as you do.”
Subscribing is, in fact, ridiculously easy.
- Get yourself a news reader. Section 4 of today’s Update includes links to several, many of which are free.
- Find a feed you’d like to subscribe to. May I suggest my blog as a starting point? (Hey, this is my newsletter; there’s no reason I can’t be self-serving with it!) Just go to http://blog.holtz.com, click, on the link that says “RSS 2.0,” and copy the URL of the resulting page into your news reader.
- There is no 3. You’re done. That’s it.
What happens now? You reader will “ping” my server as often as you tell it to. Most readers are defaulted to every 60 minutes, but you can change that to be as frequent or infrequent as you like. When I post something new to my blog, your news reader will find it, capture it, and (in most cases) alert you that the new post is there.
What’s special about this? Two main points. First, all you’ll get are posts to services you subscribe to. No spam. No CC’s from people covering their asses by copying the world on their e-mails. No jokes or inspirational stories or chain mail. Just the material you want to read. Second, you can monitor as many sites as you like without ever opening your browser. You can stay current on all the news and information sources that are important to you by simply reviewing the feeds in your reader.
Second, all those Web sites you like to follow come to you. No more surfing around to each site in order to read the latest information there (or discover nothing new has been posted). All that material is delivered to your news reader so you only have to go to one place to get caught up. (Hence the term “aggregator”.) I follow about 200 Web sites in my reader; it takes me about 40 minutes each day to stay current. Can you imagine how long that would take if I had to visit each site individually?
Before you begin to explore the use of RSS as a means of delivering information for your organization, you should become a consumer of feeds. Do it for a week. By then, most of you will be converts.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It also stands for Rich Site Summary and RDF Site Summary (RDF stands for Resource Definition Framework), depending upon whom you talk to. RSS, whatever you decide it stands for, is a means of allowing anyone with an Internet connection to subscribe to an information source and receive updates pretty much in real time without using e-mail. Developed primarily as a tool for blogs and to make the My Yahoo portal work, it has expanded well beyond these early uses.
RSS is made up of a couple key elements:
- An XML file that complies with standards for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom feeds. If you use blogging software like that produced by Typepad, Blogger or others, these files are generated automatically. You can craft the file by hand or use some inexpensive software to build the file for you. Each file contains several elements. The first of these is a “channel,” which represents the page that contains your various “items,” the individual stories or articles or posts that are part of the channel.
- A place to host the file, your own server or one where you have an account.
- The news reader, which your readers use to subscribe to your (and other) feeds.
(“Feed” is just a fancy high-tech word for the items that are sent from a server to the news reader. )
It’s really simple (hence adoption of the acronym “Really Simple Syndication”) and it’s going to get easier. Dave Winer, the “godfather of blogging” and one of the developers of RSS, is behind an initiative to develop “click to subscribe” functionality.
3. How To Use RSS
The primary use of RSS is for the eventual elimination of your opt-in e-mail mailing lists. There’s research aplenty to support the idea that people are fed up with e-mail. It’s not the fault of the technology, which works just the way it’s supposed to. Rather, it’s the fault of those evil ne’er-do-wells known as spammers. Spam has led to the introduction of spam filters, which invariably produce false positives—that is, they filter out legitimate e-mail you want to read. And, of course, some spam sneaks past your filter and gets into your in-box anyway. Consequently, the degree of trust people have in e-mail has diminished considerably over the last few years.
Any of your opt-in mailing lists are candidates for RSS. This includes press releases, financial updates, product announcements, notices of upcoming events or activities, and notification of changes or updates to the Web site.
There are more innovative uses to which RSS can be applied, some of which I hinted at earlier. For example, you can notify your media contacts of an RSS feed to which they can subscribe; you’ll use it whenever there’s a story you want to pitch. One company is using RSS feeds to let readers subscribe to products they’re interested in. Whenever that product is made available somewhere on the Web at a lower price than was available before, it generates a feed. RSS is a relatively new technology, so much of what it will be used for in the future hasn’t been devised yet; you are limited by your imagination.
For you internal communicators, the opportunities are even greater. One of the biggest complaints I hear about intranets is that it’s hard to drive traffic. If employees don’t click to the news page on the browser, they don’t see the news. If every employee has a news reader with a default feed to vital all-employee news, you’ll be able to push the news to them. Of course, if they want to read more, they can click the headline to open the browser directly to the story. Then, employees could select other feeds in order to get news that may be of interest to them but not necessarily to others.
What other material could you make available as feeds to employees? New executive speeches, upcoming employee activities, project updates, new addition to departmental intranet pages, just about anything. You aren’t limited in the number of RSS feeds you create. In fact, the more targeted you can make them, the more inclined employees will be to subscribe since they know they’ll get meaningful news and not a lot of material that isn’t relevant to them.
Most organizations with RSS feeds make them available in two places:
- On the relevant page
- In an aggregated listing of feeds (like this one at Yahoo! News: http://news.yahoo.com/rss/
Another way to use RSS is, of course, with blogs—one of the original reasons for the development of RSS. I don’t want to go too deeply into the use of blogs in formal communication. However, lest you think this is a practice whose time has not yet come, let me point you to two blogs. First is http://fastlane.gmblogs.com, a blog for General Motors executives currently featuring several prominent posts by Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chairman. Second is the new blog from Margot Wallstrom, a commissioner of the European Commission responsible for Industrial Relations and Communications. Her blog is at http://europa.eu.int/comm/commission_barroso/wallstrom/profile/index_en.htm. Executive blogs are for real and communicators need to start taking them seriously, along with product blogs and employee blogs.
Internally, blogs are being introduced to intranets at a record pace, used for everything from knowledge transfer to project management.
Since both internal and external blogs feature RSS feeds by default, your audiences within and without will easily be able to subscribe to these feeds.
4. News Readers
When it comes to RSS news readers, you have a wealth of options available to you. Your two most basic options are software to install on your computer or Web sites that provide news reader services.
First, software (which is my preference, since I can read feeds on my laptop that were delivered earlier even when I’m no longer connected). I use software called FeedDemon http://www.feeddemon.com. I’ve tried several readers and settled on this one—at least for now. It’s easy to use and boasts several features I like. It’s also an investment of $29.95. Some of the more popular free readers include RSSFeedEater at http://www.babisoft.com/. A lot of people seem to like Pluck, at http://www.pluck.com.
A fairly comprehensive list of most alternatives (even though it doesn’t feature FeedDemon) is at:
http://www.hebig.org/blogs/archives/main/000877.php.
One alternative to consider if you’re an outlook user is NewsGator, which integrates into Outlook. You view your RSS feeds just as though they’re another folder in your e-mail. It’s at http://www.newsgator.com.
NewsGator also offers a nice Web-based service, so you don’t have to install software on your computer at all. Just log into your account (it’s free) to read your feeds. Bloglines is another Web-based service (http://www.bloglines.com).
5. RSS-Related Software
There’s other software out there to make life easy with RSS. For example, I use an application called FeedForAll to create the XML pages ready to post. I just fill in a few fields and push a button; the page is built on the fly.
FeedForAll is a terrific program, and it’s relatively inexpensive at $39.95. Alternatively, you could get the RSS Channel editor for free. It’s at http://www.xml.com/pub/r/103.
Another free feed-generation program is available at:
http://hunterdavis.com/ssrss.html
Another feed generator you can buy (for $29.95) is at:
http://www.castlesoftware.biz/NewzAlertComposer.htm
6. More Information And Resources
Articles on RSS and RSS feeds. This site also provides targeted feeds of content that could be of value for publication on some Web sites:
http://www.allrssfeeds.com/
A couple ways to search the blogosphere:
http://www.technorati.com
http://www.pubsub.com
A couple plain-English explanations of RSS (just in case this one was incomprehensible):
http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000528.html
http://rss.softwaregarden.com/aboutrss.html
An RSS tutorial for content publishers and webmasters:
http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/
A video introduction to RSS:
http://www.rssdomination.com/video.htm
7. These Are A Few Of My Favorite Feeds
Many of the RSS news readers—like FeedDemon and NewzCrawler—come populated with some starter feeds of general interest. But since we’re all in the communications business, I thought I’d share some of the feeds I follow in order to stay on top of topics related to my work. In order to subscribe to any of these, all you have to do is copy the related URLs I’ve included here into your news reader.
First off, I have some Google News updates delivered as RSS feeds.
Public Relations:
http://www.justinpfister.com/gnewsfeed.php?q=%22public+relations%22
Employee Communications:
http://www.justinpfister.com/gnewsfeed.php?q=%22employee+communications%22
You can set up your own RSS feeds for any Google News search you like, including your a regular search for occurrences of your company’s name in the news:
http://www.justinpfister.com/gnewsfeed.php
The Online Journalism Review from USC’s Annenberg School of Communications has good material:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/rss.xml
Another good source of information on the changes in journalism and communication comes from the Poynter Institute’s Tidbits column:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/rss.xml
One more in this vein is “Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism,” a new blog by the former tech columnist from the San Jose Mercury News:
http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/index.rdf
From the world of technology, Common Craft is a blog that covers the whole notion of online communities:
http://www.commoncraft.com/index.rdf
Enterprise RSS is a blog dealing with…well, you can figure that one out for yourself!
http://enterpriserss.typepad.com/enterprise_rss/index.rdf
Nooked is a company that provides corporate RSS services, and their blog is often useful and interesting:
http://www.nooked.com/news/feed/nooked?c=Nooked+Blog
Slashdot is the definitive community for tech-oriented folks. You’ll see a lot of posts you don’t care about and some that grab your interest.
http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rss
Doc Searls’ Weblog comes from one of the co-authors of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”
http://partners.userland.com/people/docSearls.xml
Among business-oriented blogs, I follow the Business 2.0 blog:
http://business2.blogs.com/business2blog/index.rdf
FCNow is the blog from FastCompany magazine:
http://blog.fastcompany.com/index.xml
I maintain a list of PR and communication-focused blogs on my blog at http://blog.holtz.com. There are many, many of these. A few to get you started include Micropersuasion by Steve Rubel, which has achieved a sort of celebrity status outside the world of PR:
http://steverubel.typepad.com/micropersuasion/index.rdf
Neville Hobson, a Brit living in Amsterdam, is my partner in the “For Immediate Release” podcast; his blog is very popular:
http://nevon.typepad.com/nevon/index.rdf
Just for fun, get Steve Crescenzo’s “Corporate Hallucinations:”
http://www.ragan.com/stevesblog/RSS/
8. Boilerplate And Subscription Information
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