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Commentary by blog and social media consultant Josh Hallett on the use of blogs for public relations, media, marketing, communication & branding and from time-to-time the unsolicited opinion.
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This weekend, TechCrunch posted some data on how Twitter is driving traffic to their web site. We're seeing the same thing for the majority of our clients that have Twitter integrated into their social media program.
For many people, Twitter is replacing their RSS readers
I agree, both on a personal level and from the client perspective. Those of us that have worked in social media for a while all have very congested RSS readers. At times, opening up Google Reader is a chore and requires a block of time in the calendar.
For personal use, Twitter is becoming the new RSS because the links are typically coming from trusted sources, i.e. your friends, or in the case of corporations, they're companies that WANT to follow.
On the business-side of things, tracking that Twitter traffic is fun. First off it shows you how much of a die-hard fan base you have. You know, the folks that click on a link within a few seconds of it being tweeted. They WANT the information. It's also interesting to see the information is spread within existing Twitter networks, as in who is influencing who. And all of this happens in real time.
Jackie Huba posts a recap of their recent book tour to promote Citizen Marketers. She lists a number of stats, two of which are shown below:
- Number of books sold: 7,445
- Blog subscriber increase from 15,735 to 47,798 during tour, via Feedburner. (The jump in subscribers on 2/18 is due to Feedburner adding Google Reader subscribers.The hiccups in May are due to a Google problem in reporting subscriber counts to Feedburner.)
Jackie notes that the increase might be related to the Google Reader. Even if the under-reporting at first was 100%, i.e. instead of a baseline of 15K it was 30K, that's still an 18K increase in subscribers. On the low end Jackie and Ben now have 18K new readers/potential customers. On the high end it's 32,000.
While the primary goal of a book tour is to sell books, I think the increase in RSS subscribers is a more important result.
I learned an important lesson yesterday at the Atlanta airport. If you are using the paid wifi in the terminal and you open up a desktop-based RSS reader like NetNewsWire, the network assumes your flurry of RSS-grabbing activity is a suspicious event. About 10 seconds after opening my RSS reader I was presented this message in my browser:
Yep, I was blacklisted. The 'system' assumed that my machine was infected with a worm or virus. In the end I was able to experience around a minute of my paid wifi service.
For the past six or seven years we've been going to Highlands, N.C. for Christmas. It's a small, charming town in the western part of North Carolina.
This year while eating lunch at a small cafe on Christmas Eve I was shocked to overhear the table next to me talking about RSS feeds. I tried not to eavesdrop too much, but it was a discussion about using RSS to receive news and even podcasts!
It's funny that I try to use Highlands as an escape from technology and the table next to me it talking RSS.
Christina Wodtke says she is knowingly stirring the pot with her post, Is RSS a bad idea?
- The vast majority of folks can’t use it
- A large majority of those who can, set it up then ignore it
- It doesn’t filter, it just puts all the crap in one place
- It kills a content provider’s ability to survive, if they provide full feeds
- It annoys customers if it only provides teasers
- Adding feeds is typically a painful, annoying process, even with myyahoo, feedburner, etc
I think some of the initial items on her list are due to low adoption, but many of her points can be related to just about any new technology. I remember when I first started on USENET back in the early 90's. Yes, the vast majority of people didn't use it, once I subscriber to a dozen groups I ignored some of them, etc....but there was good content and community there. However USENET is now dead for the most part....so perhaps that's not the best analogy :-)
It's been said before, but it's worth repeating. Be sure you monitor your web address in Technorati in addition to specific keywords. Sure, many PR firms will search for their client names and services but remember to look for the URL.
What do I mean by this? Well, enter the full URL of your site in the Technorati search, i.e. http://www.hyku.com/. When you do this Technorati will show you any blog link to that specific URL. This type of search will uncover some additional conversation around your company/client that never mentions the name or keywords you might normally be looking for.
For example, an unhappy shopper might write a blog post that says, "I hate this store!" and link the word 'store' to your site. If you're just monitoring the basics, i.e. company name, service name(s) and the variants then you would miss this link. By monitoring the URL of the site, Technorati would pick it up.
Of course you can always do the standard link:URL search on Google, but that's a traditional relevance search, but a real-time blog search.
All around smart-guy-pr-blogger Joseph Thornley wisely notes that with the release of Internet Explorer 7 the majority of web users will now start to see that little RSS icon.
With tonight’s release of Internet Explorer 7 the other 85% of the world is about to see that orange icon appear on their browser toolbar. And when they see it change from grey to orange, the clicking will start. And no one will care what RSS means. They’ll just be subscribing.
Will we all see huge increases in RSS subscribers? Probably not right away. I assume that the users who are busy downloading/installing IE7 are the standard early-adopter crowd and probably already use RSS.
However, it will be interesting to watch/compare RSS subscription rates with the adoption curve of IE7. FeedBurner, did you get that?
A long time ago I asked why FeedBurner didn't buy/merge with a traditional stats firm so I could get my RSS and blog stats in the same place. Well our prayers have been answered. FeedBurner just bought out Blogbeat. You can read the FAQ over at Blogbeat's site.
Neville posts a round-up of notes about PubSub.
Perhaps one indicator, here at Gnomedex Bob Wyman has scratched out PubSub.com from his name badge and has written in wyman.us.
Just trying to access PubSub.com this morning and getting nothing. So are they gone for good?
Update: I've IM'd a few friends, some can get to it, others can't?
Over at the Technorati blog Peter Hirshberg writes about the partnership between Technorati and Edelman to develop localized language versions of Technorati. Richard Edelman briefly mentioned this on his panel at Syndicate last week.
Technorati is accelerating the development of fully localized versions of our service in Chinese, Korean, German, Italian and French. These will be moving through development and testing over the coming months and will be complete, public products in early 2007. (Technorati today can show posts in 20 languages, but so far we've only done completely localized versions in English and Japanese).
Edelman is providing support for this accelerated development effort and will have access to these new sites as they are in development and testing this year. They will be working with their international clients on how to listen to and engage the blogosphere.
Update: Richard Edelman posts about the announcement.
Here is the audio from the breakout session on Structured Blogging.
Syndicate-Structure.mp3
On the panel were:
Jen Consalvo - AOL
Eli Chapman - Mediatronica
Constantine Gus Spathis - PubSub
Chad Dickerson - Yahoo
Scott Abel - The Content Wrangler
Here's the audio from the morning keynote by Steven Schwartz of Reuters.
Syndicate-Reuters.mp3
Do you use NetNewsWire? Do you know how it works? No?
Don't worry Brent Simmons has posted a behind-the-scenes look at how NNW reads feeds.
Here is the audio from the Syndication and Community Development session.
Syndicate-Community.mp3
On the panel were:
Pete Blackshaw - Nielsen BuzzMetrics
Bill Schreiner - AOL - AIM
Jason Levitt -Yahoo
At Syndicate Jason Levitt from Yahoo just mentioned this URL: http://developer.yahoo.com/rss/
It's a complete list of every RSS feed that Yahoo publishes. It's quite a comprehensive list.
Update: Turns out I do have the audio, here it is.
Syndicate-SMS.mp3
I jacked into the audio panel to record this session, but the line level was nill so I have no audio from this session. I didn't take any notes since I was intent on listening/participating.
On the panel were:
Dave Panos - Pluck
Peter Negulescu - San Francisco Chronicle
Peter Horam - AllBusiness.com
Here is the audio from the final morning keynote from Syndicate. It was a spirited discussion about the future of RSS.
Syndicate-Grokking.mp3
On the panel were:
David Geller - WhatCounts
Mike Davidson - NewsVine
David Sifry - Technorati
Eric Ella - Brightcove
As David Sifry is on stage at Syndicate, a search for 'syndicate' on Technorati returns nothing.
I know David gets tired of providing tech support/apologizing for his product, but it's sometimes tough for us lovers or Technorati to constantly pimp their service when things like this happen.
Update: I've posted audio from Jeff's session.
For the next two days I'll be posting short items from Syndicate Conference in New York City. First up this morning is Jeff Jarvis. I've got a photoset going. Or you can check out other stuff here.
Jeff is opening up his keynote focus to a vote. He presented four ideas and had the audience vote, Money and Syndication won out.
Part of measurement is not the tracking of links, it's the tracking of the knowledge of the crowd. Why are people linking? Is it linking to friends or knowledge?
Towards the end of the session it has devolved into a Technorati love/bash fest, not very productive and much like the AV kids arguing. I've posted the audio from the session.
For now Rick Klau's has some good notes on Jeff's session. Other notes:
- David Weinberger
Rex asks: Have you still not set up a newsreader? Good point. When I deal with a web development firm (or any tech outfit) for a project and they don't know/use RSS then they lose a ton of credibility in my book. Am I alone in thinking like this?
David Sifry has posted his latest State of the Blogosphere update. You all know the drill, go check it out.
- Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
Matt Certo from Websolvers has an interesting idea about prioritizing content within RSS.
It occurred to me that RSS needs to 'deepen.' Perhaps it already has, but noone's bothered to tell me. Let me explain what I mean...
RSS should enable a content creator to prioritize his/her content. For example, Steve's post that IceRocket has been acquired is probably higher priority than his quick tip about Flickr. Why not allow a content author to prioritize posts (ranging from urgent to trivial). This would allow me, as a reader, to be able to cut to the chase after a long vacation. To some degree content categories allow me to segment my subscriptions, but I'm not sure that most authors (or subscribers) think of it this way.
In response to my post yesterday about the candidates for Florida Governor needing to track social media I set up a Blogdigger page to aggregate all blog and news content that mentions their names.
For some reason though, the Blogdigger account is not updating often enough so I created a NewsGator account that features the same information. Go to: http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/WebEd2.aspx and use the following information to login: U: FloridaGovernor P: fl2006
If you want to subscribe to the individual RSS feeds here they are:
Charlie Crist - Technorati / Google News
Jim Davis - Technorati / Google News
Tom Gallagher - Technorati / Google News
Rod Smith - Technorati / Google News
Head on over to Technorati and do a search for "Charlie Crist" (Charlie is a candidate for Governor in Florida). Scroll down a little bit and you'll find a few interesting posts. One of which is from a girl that claims to be a regional data coordinator for Charlie's campaign. Please note that some of the content is Not Safe For Work (NSFW). Charlie's opponents will probably want to get some screen captures of this since it will most likely be gone very shortly.
Ever since Technorati started to index MySpace blog posts the results have been pretty interesting for a number of searches. Like I've said before any campaign that isn't using blog/CGM monitoring tools is going to always be behind the curve.
Reading Steve's recent post about the future of newswire services such as PR Newswire and BusinessWire I can't help but think of Bob Wyman's recent post about edgeio and structured blogging. In his post Bob talks about how edgeio is differentiating itself from 'walled garden' services such as Craigslist by collecting public data and aggregating it.
This is very similar to what Steve was referring to, a new PR wire service that collects data from corporations and other sources and then aggregates/pushes it to end users. If users started tagging each release and pinging the appropriate server it could easily be done. But how is that different or any more difficult than what we can do now with Technorati or PubSub and a few good watchlists? It's not, that's the thing. If somebody would just focus some resources to made it dead-easy to use then they'd have something.
The big issue is trusting the source, we can't just have everybody issuing a corporate press release can we :-) Just ask Emulex about that. That technical issue should be a small hurdle though. The big hurdle is getting more journalists and newsrooms to use RSS.
Technosailor points out that Technorati is now indexing MySpace blogs. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? As Aaron points out it will add some clutter to the results from Technorati, but hasn't there always been clutter?
Overall, I think the ability for businesses to monitor this large social network will have some benefit (aside from the Big Brother aspect). MySpace has always been somewhat nebulous to the corporate world, but they could learn a great deal from the kids.
(Hat tip to Steve)
I've been using the new beta of NetNewsWire for a few weeks now and haven't discovered a single issue. As many others have noted there is a significant speed increase which helps when you refresh 500+ feeds. So far the syncing with NewsGator Online is awesome (granted the first sync took some time).
In other 'NewsGator News', the company has restructured their pricing and product offerings. The new model pushes the purchase of their stand-alone readers such as NewsGator Inbox (for Outlook) $29.95, FeedDemon $29.95 and NetNewsWire $19.95. All of these products now offer synchronization with a web-based RSS reader, NewsGator Online.
The biggest change is the simplification of online offerings with NewsGator Online. Previously they sold a number of different levels of online services. Some included synchronization or mobile versions of the reader plus some other 'premium content'. In total I think there were around 6-8 different price points, and it was very confusing since they also offered personal and business flavors as well.
There are now two price points for the online RSS reader: Free and Premium. Free is well you guessed it, free and offers a basic, yet very functional web-based reader that will satisfy most users. The premium version adds a number of features such as mobile readers (Blackberry/Cellphone) and e-mail alerts. The cost for the premium service is $19.95 per year.
I'm signing up for the premium service, you really can't beat a one-time cost of twenty bucks to get a mobile based reader that is synchronized with all your other RSS readers. It is ironic though that they display a 'box' for the online service :-)
Last week I was at a client meeting, during my presentation I asked, "So when are you planning to launch X?" I received a quick response from a few members of the audience, "How do you know about X?" How do you think?
I pulled up a few blog posts that were talking about the launch of this new product. This of course shocked the client, but it happens all the time. In preparation for my meeting I had been monitoring the company name via watchlists in: PubSub, Technorati and Google News.
One new element that is appearing in my watchlists are job listings from Monster.com. Now I know what new markets they are expanding into..."Why are you hiring an account rep in X city?"
Need any more reasons to start using RSS to monitor your company/brand/client/competitor names? Many moons ago I wrote up this guide to media monitoring via RSS. It's badly in need up an update (on the to-do list), but the general information holds true.
Greg Hoffman is learning all about spam blogs to protect his company from them.
The $300 software looks for datafeeds and automatically publishes the digests to a blog with related content so the owner can sell Google Adwords based on that content. You see, we lose money when people go to search for our company name and they are redirected to other sites with similar products. This does not make me happy. That's why I'm on this crusade.
You learn by doing.
Here's an interesting example of why you need to create watchlists in RSS. Last week I discovered the web stats for Florida gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis. It took the campaign 41 hours and 3 minutes to discover their snafu via another local blog.
Had they been using a watchlist via PubSub or Technorati they would have known within a few minutes. Which is better, 41 hours or 5 minutes?
You can add these RSS feeds to your reader:
- Technorati watchlist for any blog post that mentiones "Jim Davis"
- Technorati watchlist for any blog that links to http://www.jimdavis2006.com/
- PubSub feed for any blog post that mentions "Jim Davis"
If you run a political campaign contact me. I can give you quite a few more tips.
I am getting tired of Blogger-based RSS feeds. Not a day goes by that a few of them 'rebuild' and show up as completely unread in my newsreader. One repeat offender normally had 30-40 items in his RSS feed and not a week went by that they would all become 'unread'. Unsubscribed!
I put this on the same level as sending me 3-4 versions of the same e-mail newsletter. I can only assume that the blog authors do not know this is happening.
Anybody else seeing this?
Here is another round-up of Florida-based Hurricane Wilma blogs:
Bloggers:
Media:
Other media outlets that don't have blogs, but are posting updates:
The Naples News has switched to a Storm Edition in advance of Hurricane Wilma. The newspaper staff explain the switch:
For the next few days, the Naples Daily News and Bonita Daily News will be publishing their online content only on BonitaNews.com in order to have one source for all Hurricane Wilma information. BonitaNews.com is more capable of providing our readers quick, accurate and detailed information about the approaching storm and its effects on Collier and south Lee counties.
The new site is being run by some type of blog software a web framework by the name of Django and features a RSS feed of headlines. The Daily News is also producing a podcast (RSS) of hurricane coverage.
The finishing touch? They have a Wilma favicon: 
I've updated my list of local media Hurricane Wilma blogs.
The Orlando Sentinel have fired up their Hurricane Blog. Six posts in the past hour. They're off to a good start.
I am watching the Orlando Sentinel feed and NOAA's Hurricane Wilma feed.
Om Malik posts that his sources tell him that NewsGator is going to annouce a deal to buy Ranchero Software, the makers of NetNewsWire. As Om says, NNW is the RSS reader of choice for Mac users. And like Om, I am excited at the prospect of Mac/PC/Online syncronization of my feeds.
I wonder what will become of MarsEdit, Ranchero's simple blog editor?
Scoble lists the platforms that NewsGator works on.
Update: It's a done deal.
FeedBurner has launched a new e-mail subscription service for RSS feeds. The new product is a partnership with FeedBlitz.
Blog readers that are confused by RSS and the whole 'feed' thing can now receive e-mail updates from your blog. While this service is nothing new (many services offer the ability to receive e-mail updates) the consolidation within FeedBurner is nice. If you remember a few weeks ago they launched their PingShot service. FeedBurner is doing a good job of providing all the services that RSS provider would want/need. Now if only FeedBurner would offer traditional stats....hmmmm.
Update: FeedBlitz has an FAQ about the service on their blog.
Continue reading "FeedBurner Partners with FeedBlitz on E-mail Subscriptions" »
AdRants reports that 29 percent of traffic to a site created as part of a recent Audi A3 campaign was generated by advertising on the BlogAds network.
The kicker is that 29 percent was achieved with just one half of one percent of the overall media budget. Let's say it again, advertising on weblogs deliver Audi 29 percent of all responding yet took just on half of one percent of the budget to do so. To drive the point home even further, Mickinney-Silver, on its A3 timeline site states, "The media cost for the entire blog ad buy was less than the cost for one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo!"
I guess I should balance this out with a story about an amazing blog advertising failure. Anybody got one?
Elizabeth is fed up with tagging. She says, "Tagging is too much work." In the past few weeks I have had a number of conversations with people who share the same opinion.
Like many TypePad users, Elizabeth is limited in tagging solutions. Yes you can use your categories to tag your content, but anything further requires inserting the proper HTML into your posts.
Moving to MovableType or WordPress is the best option, but not always feasible. A few months ago I documented how I can easily tag my posts within MT.
I know that tagging my posts has led to increased traffic from Technorati and other search tools that support tags. Granted it is very easy for me include them in my posts.
Over at the Burning Door, FeedBurner has announced PingShot a service that notifies aggregators and search engines when your feed has been updated. On the post there is an FAQ about the new service.
A quick check of my FeedBurner account shows the new option (click image for larger version):
The default services listed are Technorati and My Yahoo. You can check: PubSub, Ping-o-matic and NewsGator and then add up to three other services which include: Feedster, Icerocket and Weblogs.com
If you have a FeedBurner account you will need to activate this service via your control panel. Outside services such as web directories and search tools may submit their name to receive notifications of updates.
Don't think you need to publish full-text RSS feeds? Think again.
Looking at the Search Engine Watch review of Google Blog Search:
Google's blog search indexes all of the content it finds in feeds, but does not attempt to access and index the full content available on a publisher's web server.
One more reason why you should publish full-text feeds.
Niall Kennedy writes that RSS reader, NewsFire is now blocking RSS ads from Google and FeedBurner as part of the default install.
In November of last year I predicted that this would come about:
I see a few things happening in the coming months regarding RSS advertising (many of these items mirror the battle between consumers and banner advertisers):
- First and foremost, newsreader application developers will release new versions that will disable or block advertising. I would be willing to pay an extra $5-10 in cost for an application it if blocked advertising (works for Tivo). For web-based readers, perhaps a Firefox extension will be developed to block ads.
- This will lead to feed services such as Feedburner to begin blocking feeds sent to known newsreader applications that are blocking feeds. The battle is on
Now we'll see what the next step will be.
Update: Looking at the comments from Niall's blog here are a few items:
Will NewsFire now mysteriously drop out of Google's search listings?
Not quite the first. We've had that functionality in the (free) CITA RSS Aggregator since April. Our implementation is tailorable and can be switched on and off on a per feed basis.
In the latest of his 'State of the Blogosphere' posts, David Sifry of Technorati addresses Spam Blogs and Fake Blogs. David talks about why he differentiates spam blogs from fake blogs:
I should note that some fake blogs may very well contain interesting and relevant content, which opens a debate onto how useful or valuable they are. This is why I don't include fake blogs in with Spam blogs (as defined above) because it is debatable that these systems are actually providing readers some value.
I find the fake blogs to be more aggravating since they often get you to click-thru from a search result, only to find you've wasted your time. His highlights from the article:
- Along with the explosive growth in the blogosphere, there has also been a growth in spam blogs and fake blogs
- These blogs are almost always created by automated programs, not by people
- They are usually created with an economic incentive - to get better search engine rankings, or to create affiliate or advertising revenue
- Technorati has been working closely with major toolmakers, search engines, and hosting providers to quickly identify and stamp out spam and fake blogs
- The key to reducing blog spam is to eliminate economic incentives, and we are working with major advertising and affiliate programs to create roadblocks for spammers and creators of fake blogs
- Industry players including Amazon, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Drupal, Google, MSN, Six Apart, Technorati, Tucows, and Wordpress and others are getting together in the second half of September for the second Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit.
Related Posts: Spam in RSS, PubSub's Thoughts, Tag Spam in Technorati, RSS and Blog Spam: A Losing Battle?
Google News has added the capability to create custom RSS feeds based upon searches. Like many, I've been waiting for Google to do this. Not sure why it took them so long.
Up until today, all we've had is the solution that Justin Pfister created last year.
Thanx Justin.
Update: Dave Winer is having some issues with their feeds.
RSS2PDF is a service that will convert any RSS feed to a PDF document for printing. (Here is hyku in PDF format)
I can see a few interesting uses for this service. If you know you'll be away from the computer for a while you could print some of your favorite blogs or watchlists to take with you. It might also have some interesting internal uses for providing documentation or news to staff that need printed material.
Of course looking over a few blogs in PDF it once again shows a benefit to providing a full feed.
Fred Wilson describes why Posting, Subscribing and Tagging are the three things that blogging is all about for him. It's all part of the new read/write web (you know Richard MacManus has done a good job branding himself when you can't write read/write without thinking of him)
A few friends have been having some issues including Technorati tags in their blogs so I thought I would put together a how-to of what I've done.
The simple modifications I have made to my MovableType software makes sure that any tags I include are quickly indexed by Technorati and other services that utilize tags. Using Blogger? Richard Massoner sent me a link to a Greasemonkey script that helps put tags in Blogger.com blogs.
Common Mistakes
- Include Tags in Your Post (RSS): The tags must be included in the post and not just a part of your blog template. That's the problem that MindComet has with their blog. They've just listed the tags on the blog template and not the individual post. Only content that is part of your post is included in your RSS feed. Items that are part of your blog template are not included in your RSS feed.
- Publish Full Text in RSS: If you are not including the full text of your post in your RSS feed the blog index tools will not see your tags. This is because most people put the tag code at the end of the post which is often not included in a partial feed.
- Failure to Ping: You have your tags coded correctly, you're publishing a full text feed but still nothing? You might not be pinging the blog index tools each time you publish a new post. If you are using MovableType of TypePad your blog should be configured to automatically ping Technorati. If you are unsure you can always use Ping-o-Matic!
- Technorati is Not the Only Game in Town: There are other blog search tools that are starting to use tags. IceRocket is another blog search that you can ping with your tagged posts.
Background Info
You can review Technorati's help page on Tags to get the basics. The two most important items are:
1. Including the proper code in your RSS feed or blog post
2. Pinging the blog index such as Technorati
Failure to do both of these will result in your tags not being indexed. Every time a friend contacts me with an issue it's because they have a problem with one of those items.
Continue reading "How-To Include Tags in Your MovableType Blog" »
One of the interesting features of NetNewsWire is that it tracks the changes to items in RSS feeds. If an author edits a post the new items are presented in green and the deleted items in red. Most of the time the changes are spelling corrections or minor edits. Mark Cuban is one great example. Mark will usually make a number of small edits shortly after he originally posts an item.
Every once and a while a major edit will take place. The following screen shot is Dave Winer's post about the Technorati situation.
Click photo for full size
As you can see there have been quite a few changes to the post. At first is was a rant by Dave against Technorati.
We've all cut them an enormous amount of slack for a long, long time, Doc. I don't know about the rest of you, but they've been taking my data, and snarking behind my back. Everyone says they like Technorati, until you admint that you don't really, then they fess up that they don't really either. One too many stabs in the back. Too much snark, not enough perf. They take from the commons and don't put back.
Now it just quotes Doc Searl's post. Should Dave have made this major change? Obviously he was a bit upset when he wrote the original post, then thought about it, and made the edit. Perhaps he should have kept the original item up and posted a 'further thougths' in the same post?
A while back VeloNews added an RSS feed for their web content. I added the feed to my reader, but have had problems with it from day one. It looks like they've simply added RSS to their existing content management system and it's not a very intelligent solution. I think each time they create a news item in the CMS it posts to the RSS feed, even if there is nothing in the news item. On a daily basis I get these blank items in my RSS reader:
Larger screen shot on Flickr.
On Monday I had lunch with Mark Russell and Anthony Moor of the Orlando Sentinel. Here are some notes from that meeting.
Like many of the other newspapers/journalists/media I have met with they are slowly taking steps to embrace this new medium. How many of the newsroom staff are using RSS or blogs to assist with stories? Almost none. But that's something they are going to work on changing.
On the web side they're moving towards integrating external RSS feeds into their content offerings. These external feeds will be topic driven, i.e. business feeds in the business section. The next step would be to integrate the branded RSS reader that the LA Times is beta-testing.
The Sentinel has created a few blogs utilizing TypePad for special projects. The most recent was a Shuttle Discovery Blog to cover the return to flight. A staff reporter live-blogged the recent launch attempt. If you look at the blog you'll see they were posting quite frequently. They had quite a bit of traffic to the blog but asked how I thought they could expand their readership of an event-driven blog such as a shuttle launch. My two quick suggestions were:
1. Utilize Technorati Tags: Recent events such as Live8 and the London terror attacks have shown that information on breaking news can quickly be found via Technorati and other blog search tools. News junkies and bloggers know to use these new tools since they search the 'live' web. The Sentinel should determine the optimum tags for their shuttle posts, i.e. shuttle, NASA, spaceshuttle, etc.
2. Crosslink with other Blogs: Yes it's a basic principle of blogs, but when you tell a newspaper to link to another content source that might compete with them, they usually don't jump right on it. The day before the shuttle launch they should do some searches to find out who else might be live-blogging or providing other good content, then link to them. Chances are, those blogs will link back. I found this to be true during my Super Bowl live-blogging Experiment.
There are a few other things they can do as well, but we don't want to give away all the goods just yet :-)
Continue reading "Orlando Sentinel Lunch Follow-Up" »
Steve Rubel is talking about something I predicted back in February. People will not even know that they are using RSS. Here is part of what I said earlier this year. The quote is part of a larger article comparing newspapers integrating RSS with newspapers becoming ISPs in the mid 90's"
For many net users their first introduction to RSS will be via a newspapers 'new subscription service' (RSS to the rest of us). I assume that many of the papers will make some mention of RSS, but for the most part they will come up with a catchy name for their news readers. Users will not even know they are using RSS. Ask a tech novice what ISP they use and you may get a blank stare, ask them what online service they use and you'll get an answer.
The Tour de France is only on its first day and there is already tag spam on Technorati. The tag, Tour de France should be rather popular over the next few weeks. This makes it an obvious target for spammers. A search earlier today gave me these results:
The first result (which I will not link to) is a post that has nothing to do with le Tour. It is a site promoting DVR software for your Mac. Unfortunately this will probably get worse as the Tour progresses.
Spoke Radio is offering daily audio updates from the Tour de France, but it is not a podcast. There is no RSS feed for the MP3 files recorded by former Tour/US Postal rider and OLN commentator Frankie Andreu. In order to keep up-to-date you need to visit the site each day and download the file.
I e-mailed Patrick Bulger with Spoke Radio and asked him if he was planning on adding an RSS feed. Patrick didn't know too much about podcasting or RSS so I pointed him to some good online resources. Hopefully Patrick will get an RSS feed up in the next few days.
For now I will stick with the Sirius Tour podcast and check the Spoke Radio site when I get around to it.
There has been a great deal of talk about Steve Rubel's 'Blogs are the New Press Release' post. Check out the comments, quite a few well-known names chiming in, but no response from Steve yet. Tom Murphy, Trevor Cook and Shel Holtz all further the discussion on their respective blogs.
For the record I never make statements like "the press release is dead" or "this is the future of PR" when talking about blogs.
I am constantly interacting with PR and marketing folks via the seminars and presentations I provide and I always try to make sure I am informing/reporting (with a small dose of evangelizing) but not hyping blogs. As Trevor said:
I mean who can front up to a CEO or a corporate communications manager and say things like 'the press release is dead' or 'forget wire services and use RSS'. You would just be dismissed as a ranter.
Shel's closing line is:
But this has always been true: When you're selling hammers, every problem looks like a nail.
In that sense I sell hammers, but I am smart enough to know that every problem is not a nail. If you continue to operate that way you will quickly lose your credibility. The majority of times when a potential client calls me to talk about setting up a blog (they've heard the hype somewhere) I end up telling them it's not the right solution. Their perception and expectations are not in line with reality.
It's always an interesting situation when you tell a client, 'no I won't sell you this'. In some cases the client just finds a consultant that will say 'yes' and a poorly planned project is launched. You can usually see this coming when you review their current/past pr and marketing efforts and see many short-lived and ill-conceived attempts. (You've been through how many PR firms in the last year?)
Does Steve really believe his own hype? If so, Jeremy has an interesting idea:
...Steve Rubel saying the press release is dead. CooperKatz must love having clients read that, as now they can come back and say that they do not want to pay for press releases anymore, and if they can get refunds.
This morning I listened to the first Gillmor Daily podcast with Steve Gillmor and Dave Winer. The one comment that stuck out in my mind was Dave's about ads in RSS.
Dave said something like, "I thought RSS was the ad?"
Dave's thinking is if I am a business or a topical expert, any blog post I make could be considered an ad. By giving out a little bit of intelectual property you are attempting to attract interest and business.
Allan Jenkins has had it with fake and spam blogs hosted on Blogger and other free blog platforms.
He soon updated his post that his original outburst was somewhat emotionally driven by spam-filled results from a Technorati search.
Hey I hear you, I recently wrote about searches I did with 86% of the results being spam blogs. The most aggravating ones are the ones that look legit via a search, but once you visit them you realize they are link-farms.
This recently happend to me while doing some research for a client. I did a search for an industry term and found a result on a Blogger blog. The headline and synopsis looked legit. I visited the post and all still seemed well, until I saw that there were 50 others posts that day on a number of topics. Browsing around you could see that it was a link-farm with hundreds of topics and posts on a daily basis. Most of the content was pulled from other RSS feeds. (For more on that read Richard's post on RSS Ripoff Merchants)
Jeff Veen talks about RSS usability. As with the others who have pointed to this article, I agree that this is a major hurdle that RSS must clear.
Whenever I show audiences in my seminars how to utilize RSS it seems so cumbersome to subscribe. As with most technology, those who utilize it frequenly forget what it's like to be starting out. Any process that goes beyond two steps has any novice quickly looking for a pen and paper to write the steps down. The problem with any memorized process is that the novice returns to their computer and the experience or interface is a bit different and they get lost.
Apple is making steps with Tiger/Safari, but the best bet on the Mac is the integrated support in NetNewsWire. If you are visiting any blog/web site within the built-in browser and a RSS feed is available the small '+FEED' buttom appears. (shown right) On the PC side Onfolio does a good job with FireFox.
As a person who is constantly helping people get set up with RSS readers, the software that provides the easiest way to subscribe will always be my choice to install.
Hopefully this should be the final post on this subject for a while. Just a few items:
- Trevor Cook has listened to his audience and re-enabled full-text feeds.
- Jeremy Zawodny..."I unsubscribed from Chris Pirillo's blog because I was tired of reading a 6 word teaser to a story that didn't tell me if I'd really be interested."
- Scoble..."I'm unsubscribing from Chris Pirillo's and any other feed that isn't full text. I'm tired of reading feeds that treat me badly."
- Chris Pirillo takes his ball and goes home. But he does say that that most recent post was a full feed. Will he continue? We'll see.
Moral of the story, give the people what they want, and that can be a number of options. Chris is smart enough to offer his podcasts/interviews in MP3 and WMV format, give people a choice. Perhaps a good solution for Chris would be a teaser feed with no ads and full-text feed with subtle ads.
From Eric Eggertson
I'm not militant about it, but I find I eventually unsubscribe from most blogs that provide a severely truncated feed, just because I don't find myself getting much out of the subscription.
Constantin Basturea is also asking for full-text RSS feeds. He has put together a great list of reasons why bloggers should provide full-text feeds. Like me, Constantin e-mailed the author of a blog he read and asked them to start providing full-text in their feed.
I also agree with what Steve Rubel says
If you're using your blog to promote thought leadership, there's gold in syndicating full text
There is also a big debate in the comments of Chris Pirillo's post titled 'Full-Text Feeds are Dead'. I for one am sick of the ads I need to dig thru to get to the content on Lockergnome. That's why I no longer subscribe to any of their feeds.
BusinessWeek recently asked about when spam will start appearing in tags. It already is.
Here is a recent post about some searches I did on Technorati and Feedster that in some cases had 86% of the results on the first page being spam.
Following up on my post this morning about publishing full feeds, Robert Scoble addresses the relationship aspect of RSS:
Here, let's rank RSS feeds from worst (least useful for readers) to best.
Worst: headline only feeds with ads.
Almost worst: partial text feeds with ads.
Barely passable: partial text feeds without ads.
Better: Full text feeds with ads.
Best: Full text feeds with no ads.
I'll only subscribe to the bottom three kinds of feeds and if your content isn't really "must read" (the New York Times, for instance) then you better stick with the bottom two.
Again, when I subscribe to an RSS feed that means I want a long-term relationship. Think about what that means.
You need to build that relationship. A while ago I put out an informal survey to my readers. I was surprised by the number of responses that I received. I listened to what they wanted, and I try to provide it.
Over the weekend Neville Hobson posted a lengthy article about getting the most from RSS. The post is a good synopsis of why RSS is so important.
What I wanted to echo was the last line Neville wrote:
I'd just add one point to Robert's view - publish full content in your RSS feed, not an extract. Give me good reasons to come and visit you, not the (equally) lame way of using a bit of content with a dot-dot-dot at the end.lengthy
I couldn't agree more. I always add an RSS feed to my news reader with the intention of reading the content. You hear that blog author? I am saying to you, "I feel your content is valuable, so I am subscribing to your feed" But my time is valuable as well. By not publishing a full feed you are not providing me what I want, the content.
On the surface I could say that I will unsubscribe from any feed the does not publish a full feed without discussion, but this happens naturally. It's sort of like evolution. By not publishing your full content I don't read you as much, or the majority of your content requires a click. When the time comes around to optimize my 300+ feeds, your feed does not stick out in my mind as a valuable content source. I unsubscribe. A relationship lost.
Some people have theorized that blog publishers who intentionally do not publish a full feed do so to inflate the number of click-thrus to their blog. This might be true, but a recent experience I had offers a different option. Some blog authors don't know how to publish a full feed.
Recently I contacted Dave Aeillo who writes Operation Gadget. I told Dave that I liked reading his blog, but that I was on the verge of unsubscribing from his RSS feed since he did not provide a full content feed. His response? " I definitely could provide something more extensive than what I'm currently providing."
Dave was using the default RSS feed that his blog publishing tool created. He was considering using FeedBurner to optimize his feed, but hadn't make the jump yet. Hopefully he will make the switch and publish a full content feed.
Neville posted a follow-up on RSS today. The key line for me in that post:
As with so many things in this new communication world, the audience (readers) is firmly in charge.
How true.
Update: More thoughts on the relationship aspect of RSS
DUH! NetNewsWire does offer a Bloglines sync feature. I just didn't look around enough. So in the words of Emily Litella, 'Nevermind'
You can still read my post though :-)
Richard MacManus asked who/what will be the Bloglines killer? I agree with most of Richard's points, but here is what I want.
I want a combination app that offers both a desktop and web-based experience for the Macintosh. I want this app to maintain a single subscription list and be intelligent enough to know what I have read in both places. (NewsGator offers this, but they are PC only)
I love NetNewsWire for the Mac. The Beta 2 addressed almost all the issues I had with this first version. As Richard says in his post, web-based tools like Bloglines do not offer me a rich enough UI for heavy daily use. That's why I will always stick with a desktop app.
But I realize that at times when I don't have my laptop, a web-based tool is great. After all that is why webmail (whether from my ISP or with Gmail) is necessary. With my current set-up I have exported my feed list via OMPL to Bloglines but every time I visit the site everything is un-read. I need to make a mental note of what items I have read and what I have not.
What are my options? Switch to a PC and start using NewsGator? Not realistic. Convince NetNewsWire to build a web-based version and offer synchronization? Perhaps :-)
Why don't FeedBurner and Site Meter merge, buyout, partner or whatever? That way I could just go to one site to review all my pertinent stats on impressions and subscribers. As it stands now I need to visit two different sites that have different interfaces and different options.
Looking around, quite a few people I read utilize both services like me. Two quick examples: Stephen O'Grady & Steve Rubel
Some sort of partnership would make sense. If not, one of them should jump into the other's market. I vote for FeedBurner to expand. Their stats pages are well-designed and easy-to-use.
I know, I know, many people and FeedBurner might say, "Well that's not our core market." Well I just upgraded to FeedBurner Pro (FAQ here) and I am paying $4.99/month for up to 3 feeds. I would gladly pay $9.99/month to have a RSS feed and web site stats combo package.
You always leave conferences like BlogNashville with a renewed sense of purpose and new friends. It was great to meet a number of people that write the blogs that you regularly read and meet some new folks that you will start reading.
When I arrived at the hotel late on Friday night there was a group in the lobby area that included Dave Winer, Rebecca McKinnon, Mark Glaser, Hossein derakhshan, Staci Kramer, Dan Gillmor and J.D. Lasica. I sat with them for a little bit and just listened to the conversation. It came up that I was the one that wrote the "Blog Movie" post. Staci thought that she should be played by Debra Winger and Dave Winer requested Sean Connery.
Continue reading "BlogNashville: Recap" »
James Clark talks about search engines as media. James' comments were inspired by a Blogspotting post about the automation of PR. Some of his comments are rather valid. Towards the end though he makes these statements:
Stephen mentions a comment by Dan Forbush of PR Newswire and his statement of "RSS is going to our salvation" is another dead leaf on the ground for old line public relations agencies. RSS is not only going to be PR Newswire's salvation, it's going to be the corporate communications person's salvation to move away from paying PR agencies outrageous amounts of money to have entry level account associates pestering the media on a daily basis.
While I agree that having an entry level account associate pestering can be worse than no PR at all, there is still value in a human relationship. How will an RSS feed know the subtle likes and dislikes of a journalist? It is an interesting quote from Dan Forbush, especially since I had dinner with two gentleman from PR Newswire last night....more on that in a second.
James goes on to say:
Journalists are on to the RSS machine, if they want to seek out subject matter experts they will search online for references, articles and blogs about a subject. If they find someone interesting they subscribe to the RSS feed and read the blog and see what the subject matter expert has to say about the topic or subject of interest.
This is becoming a common misconception. A vast majority of journalists are NOT on the RSS machine. This is one of the conversations I had last night with the folks from PR Newswire. They are trying to educate journalists about RSS, but newsrooms are slow to adopt new technology. For another perspective, a friend of mine that works for a medium-sized newspaper recently made a presentation to the entire newsroom staff about blogs and RSS. Only one or two knew anything about RSS.
Walt Mossberg has put together a brief overview on using RSS. According to Mike Manuel:
In the span of 14 days we've seen a powerful one-two punch in support of social media by two of the most influential business publications in the world. You can bet a lot more companies are paying attention now...
I still think that for many people their introduction to RSS won't be via the name RSS, it will be via integrated RSS readers on newspaper or portal sites. This is something I wrote about earlier.
For many net users their first introduction to RSS will be via a newspapers 'new subscription service' (RSS to the rest of us). I assume that many of the papers will make some mention of RSS, but for the most part they will come up with a catchy name for their news readers. Users will not even know they are using RSS. Ask a tech novice what ISP they use and you may get a blank stare, ask them what online service they use and you'll get an answer.
After you read Mossberg's article, check out the guide I wrote earlier this year on utilizing RSS.
Gee it only seems like yesterday that I started seeing blog spam. The problem is getting worse, much worse. Are we fighting a losing battle?
This evening I did a search on Technorati for Lakeland Florida. Of the 20 results on the first screen, 10 were from spam blogs, 50%. I know I can e-mail feedback@technorati.com and submit the URLs of the spam blogs for removal, but why bother when 10 more will start up tomorrow?
The same search on Feedster shows 14 results with 12 of them being spam, a whopping 86%. I figured that changing the result sort to relevance rather than date would improve the results, nope. The results are somewhat different, but it's still 12 or 14, or 86%.
A few of the keywords I monitor via PubSub are almost useless now since they mostly return spam blogs. The majority of spam blogs I see are hosted on Blogger. No surprise there since it's free and the registration process is quick and easy.
What's the solution? Technorati is removing offending blogs from their databases, but how effective can that be? The other issue is what exactly constitutes a spam blog? There is the 'you know it when you see it/glaringly obvious' standard, but sometimes it might not be that easy to tell. For now PubSub is taking a hands-off approach.
It's frustrating when you are showing newbies the power of blogs and tools like Technorati, and your search results are mostly spam. You can just see the non-believers saying to themselves, "see I told you all the blog stuff was junk."
Mac OS X Server will include a weblog server. The following can be found on Apple's OS X Server page:
Weblog Server
Now non-technical users in your organization can publish web content without any special software. Calendar-based navigation and customizable themes make it easy for users and groups to publish journals, share project information and post entries right from their existing web browser. And since Weblog Server is based on XML, they can syndicate content using RSS in Safari or using weblog clients that support XML-RPC or the ATOM API.
I must have missed this feature in all the talk about the release of Tiger, the next version of desktop Mac OS X. I can't find any other mention of this feature on the Apple OS X server pages. The only reference is the paragraph I copied above.
I first read about this feature in a Wired article about the release of Tiger tomorrow.
Neville Hobson has had some of his RSS feeds hijacked. Read his detailed account. It will be interesting to see how this came about, i.e. Feed Demon issue or a hack on the web server hosting the RSS feeds.
Back in the mid 90's when I helpd start-up an ISP we could do all kinds of tricks to redirect users on our networks to other sites/pages via DNS hacks. This would mostly be done as jokes on our own staff, but it shows the power you have by controlling DNS servers.
A number of recent posts have been talking about the stalling of the RSS momentun and the possible tipping point. I have talked about this quite a bit, and hopefully this will be my last post on the issue for a while.
Look at the quote from Dave Winer that Morgan referenced when talking about the adoption of RSS by the general public:
"We are still waiting for the killer app though. We are still waiting for someone to produce the software that will switch the lightbulb on for people."
It could be that news providers are in the best position to produce that "killer app" for people. They have a chance of understanding news, but technology companies do not, says Mr Winer.
Like Dave, I think the tipping point will be caused by the integration of newsreaders by the web sites of traditional newspapers. Wired had an article last week on this subject.
Although this will not be the perfect solution, it will be the one that the public will be expsoed to. Here is part of what I wrote earlier this year on this subject:
Newspapers are realizing that users are going elsewhere for news and the standard AP feed of 'other news' is not cutting it. So why not get in early, and once again attempt to control the eyeballs.
I don't see many of the early adopters using the LA Times or any other papers' RSS reader, we'll stick with our NetNewsWire or Bloglines. But we're not who the papers are after, they want the other 97% of net users. For many net users their first introduction to RSS will be via a newspapers 'new subscription service' (RSS to the rest of us). I assume that many of the papers will make some mention of RSS, but for the most part they will come up with a catchy name for their news readers. Users will not even know they are using RSS. Ask a tech novice what ISP they use and you may get a blank stare, ask them what online service they use and you'll get an answer.
The term RSS might never be known to the general public. It might become another 'tech thing' like 'http' or 'voip'. It will be just another tech acronym that means something, but they're not sure what.
While all the early adopters will cringe when we see the clunky tools offered to the masses, the newspapers might be laughing all the way to the bank. Remember VCRplus? Any tech geek that had no problem programming their VCR looked at this product and laughed. Well they sold millions of them.
This is what Doc Searls had to say:
I think news-org aggregators will succeed if they're run by editorial people, not by advertising people. Readers come to papers for editorial, not advertising. And the editorial folks could add enormous, and unique, value to the news stream that flows in from the blogosphere. On the other hand, if these aggregators are more about capturing eyeballs than about informing readers, they'll fail, just like all those doomed projects Josh remembers from back in the '90s
Well said, if the emphasis is editorial it might have a chance of working. A key issue is how the suggested feeds are presented. Unfortunately I see a list of RSS feeds titled, "News from our Sponsors" or "Featured Partners." Will the editorial side of the paper be strong enough to list 'Alternative Views on this Issue'?
What is exciting is that we get to see all this play out over the next few months and perhaps provide some feedback. If poorly implemented will newspapers listen to criticism from the blogosphere to change some features of their services? We'll see.
Wired discusses the new trend for newspapers to incorporate branded RSS readers in their web sites.
None of the infomation is really new, but it does bring the discussion to a broader audience. I have compared this move to when papers tried to become ISPs in the mid 90's
The big issue is of course ad revenue, from the article:
Ferguson said the Times' application, which is in beta testing, can match advertisements to content in the news feed. "If someone is linking to a blog that discusses cell phones, the newsreader could deliver ads about the latest camera phone," he said. Ads will appear between the links and can include pictures, according to Ferguson.
The result might be newspapers generating increased impressions and ad revenue by featuring outside blog content. So does the blogger receive a percentage of that revenue? That's the question. For a quick recap on this subject check out:
Newspapers, RSS & Ad Revenue
Richard MacManus' thoughts
Jason Calacanis on RSS Abuse
Ross Mayfield is also noticing more spam in his RSS search feeds. By this I mean RSS feeds like PubSub and Technorati's watchlists.
I first noticed this issue back in January. I quickly heard from Bob Wyman of PubSub. Our conversation is posted here. It was encouraging to get such quick feedback from him.
On the Technorati side of the fence, David Sifry quickly commented on a post I made about other RSS spam. If you e-mail technorati at feedback@technorati.com and let them know of any spam blogs, they will investigate and remove them from their index. In the past few months I have probably alerted them to a dozen spam blogs.
It might be a losing battle though, since the problem seems to be getting worse every day.
Did my blog entry cause BNET to update their web site navigation?
Earlier this week I blogged about the re-launch of BNET. BNET is CNET's new business site. A few other people noted the CNET launch/press release. The one comment I made was that in the press release CNET talked about the 'hand-selected' RSS feeds. Looking at the BNET home page I saw no mention of RSS.
That's changed. Jay from BNET posted a comment this afternoon.
Jay from BNET.com here. Just added RSS link to nav bar. Much easier now to subscribe to blog, news and white paper feeds from BNET. Thanks.
Sure enough they did. RSS is now in the top nav. I would probably also add a link to 'RSS Feeds' in the top 'Business Blogs' feature box though.
So did my comment spark the change? Perhaps.
Stephen Baker over at Tech Beat talks about the new world of search and RSS:
This is new arena of search that companies such as PubSub and Technorati are creating. PubSub founder Bob Wyman calls it prospective search, and he predicts it will destablize many entrenched businesses. An example: Monster.com. If you tell PubSub that you're looking for a Wharton MBA who's fluent in Mandarin, and such a person posts those details on his or her blog, the search engine makes the match for you--with little need for a job-site intermediary.
My question is, why doesn't Monster.com just create their own RSS feed (or RSS tools)? You know like their competitors have.
Creative Match has an article online about uses for RSS other than syndicating blog content. Many of the items are things that I have heard/seen, but it is a good article for those new to RSS and may not realize that yes there is more to RSS than blogs.
The article does show some lack of understanding when it says:
A few hundred content publishers are using RSS to deliver audio content, such as .mp3 interviews and even “radio†shows.
I guess he means podcasts, and at last count there were over 4000 podcasts out there.
A local organization I am involved with, EMERGE Lakeland, launched their web site today: www.emergelakeland.com
What's noteworthy about this? Well the site features a blog and I am one of the contributors, along with four other EMERGE members. In addition to the primary contributors we will also be utilizing 'guest bloggers' for content. These guest bloggers will be drawn from local community leaders. The first guest blog is up now.
What is EMERGE? From the site:
EMERGE Lakeland is a meaningful networking organization of dedicated, talented young professionals ranging in age from 23-42 in Lakeland.
The other contributors are excited to be blogging, so we'll see how this blog develops. Considering the demographics of our members a web site (and by extension a blog) is the obvious vehicle to communicate with the membership.
The site was developed by Clark, Nikdel, Powell out of Winter Haven, Florida.
Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web took part in a new blogging program with JupiterResearch. With that gig he was able to review their recent report on RSS.
Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of his review. It's a good read.
Today CNET re-launched BNET - White Papers, Case Studies and Webcasts - Business Thought Leadership. Re-launch because.."From its soft launch a year ago to its redesign, which went live today." According to the press release:
BNET has amassed nearly 50,000 high-quality whitepapers, case studies, Webcasts, and audiocasts. Additionally, the site offers targeted email alerts and newsletters, hand-selected RSS feeds, and business blogs, including its award-winning "Leadership Now" blog.
Going to the BNET home page the top item is Business Blogs. Looking around though I could not easily find the 'hand-selected RSS feeds' they talk about.
In a recent article Sharon Housley talks about the benefits of using RSS to display content on your web site. From the article:
RSS offers webmasters a unique opportunity to display fresh content on websites. While publishing an RSS feed is a great way to generate site interest and increase communication, syndicating and displaying feeds from related relevant sources can also generate interest, increase traffic and improve search engine ranking.
Be careful to first read the terms of use for the feeds you might want to display. If you are planning on displaying RSS content on a business site it might not be allowed.
An old client recently contacted me becuase their web developer had add some 'news headlines' to their web site. The web developer was pulling in CNN's RSS feed to display the headlines. According to the CNN Terms of Use:
RSS is a free service offered by CNN to individuals for private, non-commercial use. Any other uses, including without limitation the incorporation of advertising into or the placement of advertising associated with or targeted towards the RSS Content, are strictly prohibited.
Utilizing the CNN RSS feed on a business web site is not an acceptable use. To be safe check to see if the RSS feed you are going to syndicate on your web site has a terms of use, and it it does, make sure it allows for commercial use.
Bloglines has added package tracking to their service. No word yet on whether this will be done via RSS or by just utilizing/rebranding the standard web-based tools that are available from UPS, FedEx and the USPS.
Back in January I posted about a RSS package tracking tool that had been created by Yakov Shafranovich. Perhaps Bloglines just used his code?
One key quote from the article indicates the direction that Bloglines is moving in.
But Bloglines wants to aggregate a broader scope of online information and become a "universal inbox" for its users, Fletcher said. "Instead of you having to go out and get all of this online information that's part of your life, Bloglines will bring this information to you," he said.
Good idea, but will they be able to topple the existing portals that web users have?
Cycling news site VeloNews has added a RSS feed to their site. Currently the feed pushes all their content in all their categories across with very short introductory blurbs. I would prefer a bit more, but obviously VN wants you to come to their site for more information.
They also seem to be doing some testing since the two most recent items are 'Test Items' with no content.
In the vast majority of blogs I read Technorati is always mentioned when it comes to blog searching and tagging. There is another tool out there, Feedster, but I rarely see it mentioned. I almost never visit Feedster anymore, when I do it's usualy during a presentation to show people that there are a few options available for blog searches.
Recently Robert Scoble listed some of the terms he watches via RSS. In that post he says:
Oh, one other thing. I link to Feedster here, but I really use Pubsub for my RSS feeds. I find Pubsub's RSS to be better formatted, that I get more items returned. But I link to Feedster because their Web interface is better. I suggest reading these things over on Pubsub if you're an RSS freak like I am.
I did a bit of very unscientific research on this topic. I used each service to search the blogosphere for mentions of their respective names. Here are the results: (All data is as of 5:30pm EST today)
Technorati
24,253 posts found on Technorati
44,788 posts found on Feedster
Feedster
5,316 posts found on Technorati
3,069 posts found on Feedster
If you total it up, it's almost an 8 to 1 margin.
Now I know this is not the best indicator, but it definitely shows who people are talking about more. Why though?
Technorati has always seemed more proactive within the blogging community. David Sifry recently posted his 'State of The Blogosphere', and is always quick to comment on other blogs regarding customer service issues with Technorati: recent case, Neville Hobson's problems with the Technorati searchlet.
What is Feedster's future? Will they always be a distant second to Technorati? Are they looking to be acquired by an existing search site?
Today's theme seems to be spam! Robert Scoble points to a Chris Pirillo interview with a spammer.
The interview touches on a variety of subjects including the 'nofollow' tag and RSS spam. One interesting item was his comments on the 'nofollow' tag. He does not see the 'nofollow' tag ending comment spam. The purpose of comment spam is not to hit live blogs (since they will most likely delete the comments) but to hit the millions of dead blogs that people have started then abandoned. Comment spam posted on dead blogs will never be deleted and chance are they also do not have the 'nofollow' tag implemented.
Interesting stuff.
There seems to be more discussion about Spam in Blogs and by extension RSS. David Sifry of Technorati brings up the issue of spam blogs in a State of the Blogosphere post.
Earlier this year I talked about how spam was moving into RSS. That post generated a response from Bob Wyman of PubSub. Bob's thoughts about the issues were summarized in a follow-up post: Spam in RSS, PubSub's Thoughts
Since I wrote my original post in January the problem has been geeting worse. I will do a few quick searches and post some examples.
Update Do a search at Technorati for LiveStrong. The first few results are all from a spam blog.
Update 2 Just in case the links go away later in the day, here is the spam blog that comes up. I am not creating a valid link for obvious reasons: http://yellow-wristbands.blogspot.com/
Quite a few people are talking about the updates to Google News. But I have noticed something else interesting that has been added to Google News in the past few days: Wonkette. If you do searches for various political items Wonkette now appears in the results. Of course there is a notation that it is '(Satire)'.
I first saw the results as part of my Google News RSS feed. Anybody else notice this? What's next The Onion?
Silicon Beat found a web-based RSS reader on MSN's sandbox.
Here are my thoughts: 1. I have no review since I use a Mac and currently only have Safari and Firefox as browsers so I can't utilize the site. 2. How long till this link vanishes?
Richard MacManus has some more thoughts and has posted a screenshot (perhaps to record it before if vanishes)
BuzzHit has posted a quick review.
BuzzHit has picked up that HotJobs is now offering RSS feeds of job search results.
Looks like there is not a big job market for bloggers :-)
A few interesting items in the comments from BuzzHit's post. First is that Scoble is working on getting Microsoft to provide a RSS feed for MS jobs. Second, there is a job site that provides RSS feeds for all job sites. Indeed.com is quick to point out on their blog that they have a RSS of Microsoft jobs.
Previous posts on RSS job feeds: Feedster Launches RSS Job Search & Job Search Results Via RSS
David Currie has created a PHP script that creates a RSS feed from the contents of an IMAP folder.
Once installed on your webserver and configured just add the RSS 2.0 feed to your newsreader and then you can check your e-mail via your RSS reader.
- The RSS feed contains the full message text.
- Includes a simple viewer for individual items in HTML, to ensure working permalinks.
-Understands multipart MIME messages, and displays a list of attachments as links as well as providing a way of downloading these attachments.
- Does some minor processing to plain-text messages to make them readable in HTML-aware newsreaders, as well as automatic URL link generation.
Please note that this solution is not a quick and easy solution for the average user. You must have a web server that will run PHP and you'll need to make sure your e-mail provider supports IMAP.
Jeffrey Hill has posted an interview with Christine Halvorson the chief blogger at Stonyfield Farm. Christine oversees Stonyfield's five blogs.
Christine was also interviewed in December of 2004 by Rick Bruner. Jeff's interview is longer than Rick's and offers some good tidbits:
JH Has he laid down any blogging guidelines? Do you have a blogging code in your company?
CH You know, we don't and it's interesting that you say that. I'm part of the public relations department so obviously we are people who are sensitive to how the public is perceiving us, but Gary Hirshberg, the CEO, said he's not concerned about that; he's more concerned about building relationships with the people who are our loyal customers. His directive to me was to be real, to be authentic. And because of the nature of our product, organic yogurt, we do get people who are very loyal and committed to eating organic food and supporting organic agriculture. So because we know that about our customers, we assume that the risk of communicating with them directly and on a personal level is one worth taking.
For an alternate viewpoint, look over Blogthenticity's take on the Stonyfield blogs. The title of the post, "Is the Stonyfield Bloghurt Experience Turning Sour?" gives an indication of the tone of the post.
Robert Scoble lays down the law when it comes to marketing based web sites. He talks about a conversation he had with a marketing person at another Microsoft unit.
Sorry,
if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired.
I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.
Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks.
Read the entire post for the whole story.
Some of the corporate bloggers I consult are hesitant to use FeedBurner's services since they feel they lose some brand identity with the standard FeedBurner URL.
The standard FeedBurner URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedname
You can see how a company that places their URL on everything would think twice about promoting a different domain name for their RSS feed.
Dick Costolo of FeedBurner posted a comment on a post about ad revenue for RSS syndication last night. I used that opportunity to ask him if FeedBurner had a solution?
Continue reading "Branding a FeedBurner Feed with your Domain Name" »
Internet Stock Blog has a post about Hollywood Media implementing RSS feeds. Hollywood Media owns Hollywood.com, Broadway.com and 26% of MovieTickets.com. From the post:
Hollywood Media has set up seven granular RSS feeds for Hollywood.com. They are:
- Trailers and More
- New Movies this Week
- Weekend Box Office Top 10
- Recent News
- New Reviews
- Celeb Birthdays
- Celeb Photos
HOLL also seems to have negotiated agreements with RSS aggregator firms Pluck and Newsgator. Both aggregators are offered for download on Hollywood.com, and Hollywood.com's RSS feeds are included as pre-installed default feeds.
A few noteworthy items:
1. Some of these feeds sound interesting, I know I always hit E! Online Sunday evening to check the box office top 10.
2. When you download Pluck or NewsGator from their site, Hollywood.com's RSS feeds are pre-installed. That's the first time I've seen that type of pre-installed option. Does anybody else know of a site that is doing that?
Continue reading "Hollywood.com adds RSS Feeds" »
Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has posted an in-depth analysis of the issues surrounding contextual advertising in RSS aggregators. This is the very heart of the matter I blogged about a few days ago. (Doc Searls thoughts)
Richard asks: in what situations is contextual advertising OK? and goes on to offer some scenarios.
Jason Calacanis discussed this issue in December of 2004 under the subject of RSS Abuse.
Being a publisher in the age of complete RSS feeds is really trying. At least once a week I’m explaining to someone that they can’t just republish one of our blogs on their site with advertisements around it, and that the RSS is for non-commercial use.
It’s one thing to take headlines.
It’s one thing to take an excerpt—like the good folks at Google, Topix.net, Feedster or Technorati do—to help people navigate.
It’s a whole other thing to take your entire feed, wrap your own ads around it, and try to sell a service on top of the content!
Somebody needs to create a product to provide RSS feed owners a percentage of the advertising revenue from sites that syndicate their content. Feedburner?
One of the terms I monitor via PubSub is 'RSS'. There has been a recent trend in the results, that is somewhat ominous. More and more I am seeing posts from blogs about how to utilize RSS for pure marketing purposes, i.e. search engine placement, driving traffic to eBay listings, 'making money via RSS' and the like.
It's unfortunate, but at least with the transparency of blogs we can read what the marketers' plans are.
See also: Spam in RSS, PubSub's Thoughts & A Different Kind of Blog Revenue Model
There has been some recent talk about how newspaper web sites are rushing into the RSS business following the launch of CNET's NewsBurst and moves by the LA Times. (Reuter's story here)
I see strong similarities between this move and the rush for many newspapers to launch a branded ISP service in the mid 90's. Just like the RSS integration, the newspapers partner or bundle a branded version of another service.
Continue reading "Newspapers & RSS, Thoughts of Newspapers as ISPs in the 90's" »
Yakov Shafranovich has written a script to convert tracking data from FedEx, UPS and USPS to a RSS feed.
Currently support is provided for UPS, Fedex Air and Ground, and the US Postal Service (USPS) via a set of XSLT templates and a Perl wrapper. The page at SourceForge is for demo purposes only. You are encouraged to download the code to implement on your own.
If you have an e-commerce system that provides tracking data to customers, this would be a nice added feature.
On Sunday night I posted an item about 'How Spam is Moving into RSS.' In the post I talked about how I am starting to see RSS based spam via feed services such as PubSub.
Knowing that PubSub is a client of Steve Rubel over at CooperKatz, I e-mailed Steve to find out what PubSub thought of the emerging issue. Before the next morning I had a reply from Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub. I was shocked to say the least. It looked like Cluetrain Theses #83: We want you to take 50 million of us as seriously as you take one reporter from The Wall Street Journal.
Bob and I have traded e-mails over the past few days. PubSub has been working on the issue, but like traditional spam there is no simple solution. Although parts of this post may seem like an interview, it is/was not. I am simply merging the comments that he and I had over the past few days. Bob's comments are in italics:
Continue reading "Spam in RSS, PubSub's Thoughts" »
Following up on my earlier post about spam invading RSS, I have been having some conversations with Bob Wyman, CTO of PubSub. I'll be posting excerpts of our discussion later tonight. Stay tuned.
I had the opportunity to meet with Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk today. Stephen was in O-town for Lotusphere. We connected at Orlando Airport (MCO) before he flew out.
Continue reading "Meeting with Stephen O'Grady" »
Technology Review has an article titled So what are you reading about a new service from Rojo Networks. Rojo's concept is to combine a RSS aggregator with a social network component.
Rojo has an RSS feed search function and gives readers the ability to flag stories they find important or interesting. But in enabling users to draw on the insights of friends, family, colleagues, and others in their social networks, Rojo departs from most of the competition. Rojo users can invite others to sign up for Rojo accounts; those accounts are linked, much like the accounts on the popular website Friendster. Rojo users can see what RSS feeds the members of their networks are reading and which stories they are flagging. Network popularity also affects the ranking of results when the user searches RSS feeds.
I went to check out the service but looks like I need to receive an invite...too bad. I guess they think they can build some buzz similar to Gmail.
AimlessWords has created an eBay RSS Feed Generator.. Enter your search terms and receive a custom feed. Slap it in your RSS reader and you're off.
What is interesting to note is the number of redirects that take place when you click on a link in the feed. I counted between eight and nine. That makes me somewhat suspicious.
I have not done the eBay thing in a while so I won't be able to test this very thoroughly. Perhaps some visitors could provide some comments.
Feedster has launched a new jobs search: jobs.feedster.com. As you would expect you can click the XML button to get a custom RSS feed of the results sent directly to your reader.
Last week I posted an item about the UK job site CW Jobs providing results in RSS format.
Now a note to all you employers out there. Do you monitor your employee's web traffic to see if they are spending time looking for another job at Monster or HotJobs? Well now you can be on the lookout for RSS traffic.
One of the major selling points of RSS is that it eliminates spam. I use that line all the time. The theory is that since you actively subscribe to the RSS feed you know the source of the content. Thus, if you don't like the content, you can unsubscribe.
Well I have found a way that spam can slip in via aggregate feeds tools like PubSub. With tools like PubSub I don't control what particular feeds I subscribe to. PubSub simply compiles all the feed results from over 8 million blogs and sends them my way.
Lately on some of the keywords I monitor via PubSub I am seeing results that are pure spam. This has only happened a few times, but I am starting to notice it. I won't give links to the offending blogs out of spite. The feed item contains the keyword a number of times with a link to a sales site or even items being sold on eBay. It's trickling in now, but there is the possibility for this to become a real problem. Setting up a new blog on Blogger and submitting a feed to services is quick, easy and free, so there are no economic barriers for spammers (one of the major issues with e-mail spam)
How do we combat this? Here's my theory. Currently PubSub is a free service. As more and more feeds are indexed by PubSub and other sites like Technorati and Feedster there may be a market for a paid service that filters out the spam.
With this new service, PubSub pays staff to review each new RSS feed added to the index. Those that are genuine are put in the 'premium index'. Feeds could be periodically reviewed, and users could submit abuse cases. Those abuse cases would be reviewed by PubSub staff, if the abuse is genuine, the feed is removed.
If RSS spam becomes a major issue, how much would you be willing to spend for spam free RSS?
Update: I have posted PubSub's thoughts on the issue.
CWJobs, a UK job site is now providing job search results via RSS. Just do a search for a job and you'll see the common orange RSS icon. Clicking on the icon will give yout URL for the feed, you should know the rest.
A quick check at Monster and HotJobs shows they don't yet offer the feature. I would imagine they would pick up on this effective use of RSS in the near future.
So if you're unhappy with your current job, just add a feed to your RSS reader, and something is bound to pop up.
Marnie Webb over at Extension 337 has posted a list of 10 Reasons Nonprofits Should Use RSS. Sample:
10. It's only just beginning. RSS is in relatively early stages. The tools are still pretty raw but it pays for nonprofits, in their efforts to gain mindshare for the change they are trying to make, it get in on the ground floor of these types of communication technologies. It'll better position you to take advantage of them as they mature and additional uses become available.
It's a good read and a great introductory piece for somebody who is not that tech-savvy (sounds like many of the non-profit folks I know).
XMLHub has created a tool that provides search results from MSN Beta Search in RSS format.
Depending on how often MSN updates their index this could be used as a crude type of watchlist, very similar to PubSub, Google News RSS Generator or Technorati's Watchlists.
A few notes from the site:- This tool will not be available permanently and will be replaced with something else when Microsoft's developer API becomes available.
- We do not intend to make this tool available for the Live MSN Search
- This tool is a very fragile hack anyway, and will probably just stop working sometime!
NewsGator has announced support for the new DivX format allowing RSS feeds and other NewsGator content to be displayed on TVs via DVD players or other set-top boxes.
"With a dynamic range of RSS feeds that allow consumers to instantly access news and information, the NewsGator service is a perfect fit for the DivX Connected Program," said Paul Sarena, Product Manager, DivX Connected Program at DivXNetworks. "In the near future, users will be able to easily access all their favorite news and information services, personal media content and a range of premium content not just on the PC but throughout the house. NewsGator is uniquely positioned to play a vital role in that scenario."
DivX Connected Certified products and services will carry a special DivX logo and will hit the market in the second half of 2005. This sounds really cool.
Perhaps an addendum to my previous post on Media Monitoring with RSS, Technorati has added keyword watchlists. This functionality is very similar to PubSub, execpt that it only watches blogs indexed by Technorati (5,538,077 of them as of this post).
You will need an account on Technorati to utilize the service, but if you are a savvy blogger you've already created one to claim your feed. Perform a keyword search at Technorati and then click on the 'Make this a Watchlist' link. Follow the instructions and you'll be provided a link to a custom RSS feed. Subscribe to this feed in your RSS reader and you're all set.
I plan to create a few watchlists and then compare the results and speed of the service compared to PubSub.
This is one of those things you see and say, "That's cool'". UPS Tracking With RSS, brought to you by SuperJason. What a perfect use for RSS.
Simpy enter your tracking number into the URL and bingo! People are already asking for a FedEx version in the comments.
This is the first of what will become a series of articles on utilizing blogs for public relations. This initial installment will provide some basic instructions for monitoring the blogosphere.
One of the first steps any PR practitioner should take when contemplating using blogs is to monitor and observe the landscape first. Why monitor? Kryptonite has become the poster child for the results of not monitoring blogs for developing trends. (Steve Rubel probably has the best recap of the Kryptonite saga)
To get started you will need to become acquainted with RSS, utilize an RSS reader, search the blogosphere, then harness the power of custom RSS feeds.
Continue reading "A Guide To Media Monitoring With RSS" »
RSS and blogging are coming up quite a bit on Slashdot. This evening's article: Is RSS Doomed by Popularity?
As RSS is becoming more known to the mainstream users and press, the bandwidth issue reported by many sites (Eweek, CNet, InternetNews) related to feeds is becoming a reality. Stats from sites like Boing Boing are showing a real concern regarding feeds bandwidth usage.
As always, the comments are good.
A few weeks ago I talked about advertising in RSS and discussed an evolution that might occur:
- First and foremost, newsreader application developers will release new versions that will disable or block advertising. I would be willing to pay an extra $5-10 in cost for an application it if blocked advertising (works for Tivo). For web-based readers, perhaps a Firefox extension will be developed to block ads.
Kottke has contacted some RSS reader developers to ask about blocking ads in RSS. The developers' responses are insightful, and a good conversation is going on in the comments.
I recently read about Newsletters by RSS, a new free service that promises to create a RSS feed based upon a traditional e-mail newsletter. I have not tried the product but it does sound interesting.
Before I reviewed the site my first thought was the decline of e-mail newsletter's impact due to spam. Nielsen addresses this in a recent Alertbox. That topic is one of the first thing mentioned in Newsletter by RSS's overview:
...because of the ravages of SPAM, publishers of emailed newsletters have seen the open rate of their newsletter drop to an alarming degree.
Newsletters By RSS is a bridge product. It allows newsletter publishers to continue to deliver their newsletters by email while trying out a new delivery vehicle - RSS technology
All you need to do is: 1. Create an account on their site 2. Add an e-mail address they provide to your e-mail distribution list 3. Receive the URL of your custom feed, and promote.
If you are utilizing the service I would love some comments.
Bloglines has launched an international version of their services. This seems like a natural progression, given the global impact blogs have had. Mark Fletcher, founder and CEO of Bloglines says:
"A significant percentage of RSS feed and blog content in our index of more than 200 million items is published in languages other than English, and that figure is increasing rapidly. We know the conversation building around RSS feeds and blogs is a global one, and we're taking action to make it easy for everyone to discover new voices and new information sources in Bloglines, in their native tongues."
Foreign language blogs are becoming very important to monitor events in countries such as Iran and the Ukraine, since the Western media does not have much of a presence in those locales.
I hope that Bloglines will track usage in various languages and provide statistics.
John Furrier writes about the Future of Communications: It's not Email Folks..It's "Feed Centric" communications! He proposes:
The fact is that younger generations of users are not prejustice by older paradigms. They look at the available tools and technology and self optimize.
..."Real Time Advertising" will emerge where the future of advertising is the information being the ad that is consumed or distributed.
This is true. Others, like Jeff Jarvis, have argued that the kids of today do not differentiate video seen on a TV from a computer. To them it's video. A long time ago I asked if kids in 5-10 years will know what dial-tone is with many consumers replacing the standard landline with a cell phone. John points to Korea as the predictor of youth's adoption of technology.
It seems that SMS, instant messenger (IM), and blogs (called "one man media" in the linked article) are the favored forms of communication.
Personally, I am not a big user of SMS. I think this is influenced by the fact that I have a Blackberry, so e-mail is easier to use. The only contacts I SMS, are those that I know do not have instant e-mail access. I would say the ratio os 100 to 1 for e-mails to SMS.
Now if only somebody would write a RSS reader for the Blackberry!
According to the November 29 edition of the FDA News Digest, the Food and Drug Administration has a RSS feed for recalls. The URL for the feed is:
http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/rssRecalls.xml
I am trying to determine when this feed was launched.
Previous post about RSS in government.
Technorati is now two years old (official announcement was on Nov 27, 2002). Niall Kennedy has put together an Unofficial history of Technorati.
I found this blog, Profit from RSS Feeds today. Although I do not agree with many of the 'tips,' it is interesting to see how some are starting to utilize RSS for things such as better search engine rankings.
Imagine if you could have a TEAM of marketers, all of them creating RSS feeds on a specific topic. By linking all of them together, you could have a network of RSS feeds - all targeted on a particular keyword or topic.
Result? Explosive link popularity and traffic - to all participating RSS feeds.
Hopefully one saving grace of RSS is that unlike e-mail spam you need to subscribe to a feed via your reader. RSS feeds should not 'appear' in your reader without your consent. Since you have control over what content you receive this should leave little interest in 'marketing/spam' based RSS feeds.
TIME's Europe edition recently had an article about RSS, titled 'At Your Service.'
The article is standard fare for a newsweekly. That is a light review of the history of the technology, how it's becoming more mainstream, and the future.
Justin Pfister has created a Googe News RSS Generator. Just enter your search tems and the results page will be an RSS feed. I tried a few terms and it seems to work rather well.
One suggestion would be to have the 'results' page simply list the URL of the feed, rather than showing the feed itself in the browser. That along with simple instructions to 'copy & paste' the URL into your RSS reader.
One comment on his blog wonders if Google will attempt to shut this down.
My local paper, The Ledger, has launched a series of RSS feeds for news. The overview of the feeds is located at: http://theledger.com/rss/.
They currently have feeds for, Local News, Business and Sports. It will be interesting to hear how many people start to utilize the feeds.
Update 09.14.05 RSS Newsreader NewsFire now blocks ads within RSS feeds
Wired has an article today about the emergence of advertising in RSS feeds. This was bound to happen eventually. I have noticed advertising for some time in my Engadget feed. RSS is similar to any new net technology, once it is established people start to say, "great, now how do we make money?"
I see a few things happening in the coming months regarding RSS advertising (many of these items mirror the battle between consumers and banner advertisers):
Continue reading "Emergence And Evolution Of Ads In RSS Feeds" »
Wired has an article about the government's adoption of RSS. Some early adopters are: U.S. State Department, NASA, the state of Delaware, the National Hurricane Center, a number of state legislatures, local governments and more.
The post also mentions RSSgov.com which is a site featuring: News about how RSS is being used by international, federal, state, and local governments.
MicroPersuasion has some more info on RSS and government.
