Welcome!

 

When we were creating this site, we tried to achieve the main aim - add to and summarize the knowledge base about RSS, blogs and related technologies. This site will be useful both for a user who learned about RSS not long ago and for a guru in RSS technologies. These pages will provide you with the detailed description of how RSS feeds are created, edited, published and promoted. Also, we have prepared reviews of software for creating RSS, online services and a collection of useful links.

 

Most popular articles:

Software for creating RSS
RSS or Atom
How to make money with RSS
What is RSS

 

RSS News:

11 October 2006

Anil Dash wrote 6 step to starting a corporate blog. A good read for any company stuck behind the blogging curve.
  1. Test the waters
  2. Understand the ways blogs can be used in your organization
  3. Identify a small, well-defined area where you'll start
  4. Set goals for the trial and educate stakeholders
  5. Create a draft blogging policy
  6. Set up a single point of contact for questions


31 September 2006

Kate Trgovac posts some bullet points from Steve Olechowshi's at Future of Web Apps.
  • The more text you make available in a feed, the more traffic you will have (this is counter-intuitive to a number of marketers who make users visit their sites to view the whole post). 
  • Understand that your feed audience is totally different than your blog audience. 
  • Feed categories: podcast feeds are more evenly distributed across various categories (tech, fashion, business, entertainment, etc) than text feeds (still heavily tech). 
  • 15% of podcasts are video 
  • More Japanese & Chinese blogs than North America & Europe 
  • RSS - bigger than blogs!  Over 3000 RSS readers and aggregators.
  • 7% of all clicks from feeds are by bots; make sure you take this into account when measuring traffic
  • MyYahoo has over 50% of Feedburner traffic.  They are successful because they make the technology transparent to the end user!
  • Firefox live bookmarks - very big for European feeds
  • There are 2900 mobile agents
  • Feeds *are* making money.  Ads for feeds are quite different than search.  Feed advertising is much more about awareness, more brand advertising.

The fact that MyYahoo! consumes over 50% of FeedBurner's traffic is irrelevant. I have a few feeds in MyYahoo!, but I rarely ever actually use MyYahoo!, which I've heard said by many others too. I'd say the same about Firefox live bookmarks.

The first bullet contradicts what many people believe and it is correct. Think about what it means in the full vs. partial feed debate.

http://www.mynameiskate.ca/2006/09/steve_olechowsh.html

Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra for the link [play tag with me candidate].

 

10 September 2006

Unlike Yahoo, Google has had a long standing resistance to offering RSS feeds for Google News queries. Hacks have long abounded from Julian Bond's GNews2RSS, Ben Hammersley's Google to RSS using the Google SOAP API, and Steve Rubel's advice in "RSS Hack for Sites That Don't Offer Feeds".

In this spirit, Justin Pfister has created gnewsfeed. Filling out the form uses a script that converts a Google news query (example) into an RSS feed (example). "I welcome anyone in the world," he humbly proffers, "to use it in an effort to become a more informed public."

Poor Justin. He's looking for a job. Maybe Adam Smith, and the Google Alerts product team will hire Justin to build in the syndication that Google should have offered long ago (hint).

3 August 2006

Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's reports that "Blog" tops their list of the 10 words of the year. Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was the most looked-up word on its Internet sites this year. The list is compiled each year by taking the most researched words on its Web sites and then excluding perennials such as affect/effect and profanity. The company said most online dictionary queries were for uncommon terms, but people also turned to its Web sites for words in news headlines.

24 July 2006

A couple of weeks ago Blog Flux launched a new section, Quick RSS Links.

A smorgasboard of RSS readers can mean too many buttons on your blog. Many blogs contain quick subscription links to a variety of RSS readers.

Blog Flux Quick RSS Links solves that problem. Instead of having a dozen buttons ruining your design, just use our service. The user clicks on the link, and viola, subscribed!

In case anyone is confused, nowhere in this process do we takeover or manage your feed. We simply make it easier for people to subscribe to your RSS feed.

For example, here are the Quick RSS Links for Official Blog Flux Blog.

 

24 July 2006

The Create RSS Feed site is being formally launched.