There’s big news today in the world of RSS feeds. NewsGator has just announced that their entire suite of RSS feed reader clients (NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, and NewsGator Go!) are now free.

On the heels on announcing a $12 million financing round last month, Greg Reinacker (NewsGator’s founder and CTO) writes about what led the company to make all the NewsGator clients free:

What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients. Anyone who wants a rich experience for consuming content, or anyone who uses multiple computers or devices and wants a best-of-breed experience on each can now use our clients. Using a Mac at home, along with an iPhone? NetNewsWire and our iPhone reader will sync up. Have a PC at the office? FeedDemon will sync with your other two applications. And they’ll all sync with NewsGator Online. It all just works.

…we’ve found that when we go into an enterprise to sell NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) and Social Sites, there are already a ton of people using one of our desktop apps already. The more folks are already using them, the easier it is to sell our server products – especially since these client apps can sync with NGES directly. So, the more the merrier – we’re going to make sure that everyone who wants to use our apps can do so, without having to climb over the hump of having to dig out their credit card.

I’ve written about NewsGator’s products in the past and NetNewsWire is one application on my Mac I couldn’t live without. And before my Mac, I said the same about FeedDemon.

What I love about the NewsGator platform is the ability to move from desktop to mobile and have all my feed reading synchronize. If you haven’t tried their products, there’s nothing holding you back now.

It’s great to see a company make a smart business move that positively benefits customers.

Here’s a quick tip for managing the constant influx of information. I’m currently on a push to move as much non person-to-person email (like newsletters, product announcements, marketing, etc.) to my feed reader.

One of the most useful and time saving techniques I’ve found is to create a folder in my feed reader labeled “products I use”

In this folder, I’ve added and moved all feeds related to products and services I use and want to keep abreast of, but don’t necessarily need to see immediately. So any time I install a new product or service, I just add their feed from the site or blog and now I’m updated on any new happenings all in one place that I occasionally check.

I’ve found this simple technique quite effective at removing many email newsletters from these companies. Additionally, this folder prevents me from constantly checking to see if a new beta has been released of my favorite current app!

Two of my favorite financial TV shows now have dedicated and updated web sites on CNBC. Jim Cramer‘s Mad Money and Dylan Ratigan‘s Fast Money also sport RSS feeds which allows me to miss these shows and still get updates on what topics were discussed. I’m usually watching these at the gym, so the ability to get the recaps in my feed reader is a huge time saver.

If you have any interest in the stock market, investing, and/or trading, these two shows should be part of your attention stream. Both shows provide excellent insight into the market while keeping it as entertaining as possible.

The other financial site I recommend is TheStreet.com. Again, Jim Cramer is an owner and major contributor to the site. With RSS feeds for every section and columnist, readers get a tremendous amount of free content before having to upgrade.

SXSW has finally posted the full audio podcast of the panel I moderated called Using RSS for Marketing. In addition, a short highlight video podcast was posted as well.

Check them out to get a feel for the content at the SXSW conference and learn about marketing with RSS from the panelists which included Emily Chang, Bill Flitter, Greg Reinacker, and John Jantsch.

As I previously mentioned here on my blog, I have a panel at this year’s SXSW Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. One of the panelists, Emily Chang, has posted an invitation on her blog today for feedback and insights into RSS and using RSS for marketing to help shape the discussion of our panel.

Please visit her post and add your thoughts (even if you can’t attend this year). One of the ideas I’m specifically interested in hearing about is how your business uses RSS for marketing or unconventional ways. Let us know what you’re doing with RSS and we can share it with a large audience at SXSW.

Technorati Tags: conferences, sxsw, rss

MyRetailRoanoke.com launched yesterday with the goal of aggressively seeking and attracting retailers to Roanoke, Virginia. The City of Roanoke, with the efforts of Stuart Mease, have done an excellent job recently of implementing a Internet based strategic marketing plan to promote the region’s opportunities and economic development efforts. From blogging to MySpace to videos on YouTube, the city is making great strides in highlighting the area’s attractive qualities for businesses, residents, and visitors. I’d also like to note that these two Roanoke sites are prominently using RSS feeds and podcasts.

Technorati Tags: marketing, internet, roanoke, rss

In my first two posts in this series, I discussed four different tips for publishing RSS feeds. If you missed either of the last two parts, you can find them here: part 1, part 2. Let’s continue on with the next three feed publishing tips.

5. Make your feed’s title and description meaningful

This tip has two related components. First, when creating your feed’s title, make it descriptive. When this feed is sitting in a list of many other feeds (hundreds likely) will the reader understand the topic or know the author? I regularly have to edit a feed’s title in my feed reader so I know what content is actually there. Why require additional steps from your readers? A feed title doesn’t have to be long and wordy. Just make it descriptive and to the point. In this case, think less in terms of search engine optimization (and adding every related term you can think of in the title) and more on the lines of “how can I make sure a subscribed reader will know what my feed is all about.”

As a side note and personal wish, it would be nice if on single author blogs (or company/product blogs) the authors would add their name in addition to their title. For example, when someone titles their blog “Very Witty Blog Title”, that means absolutely nothing to me when deciding what feeds to prioritize (or remove for that matter) in my reader. I often rename a feed’s title in my reader to the author’s name. A useful suggestion would be to append something more detailed to the title like “… by John Doe” or “… a product blog for …”

The second, related part of this tip is to add a meaningful description to the feed’s description tag. Ok, that sentence was a bit circular. Let’s try again. The actual RSS 2.0 spec refers to the feed description as a phrase or sentence describing the feed. For something so straightforward, I regularly find feeds that leave off the description or don’t take the opportunity to provide a relevant description for their feed. As only one of three required feed elements in RSS 2.0 (title, link, and description), take the time to make your feed’s description accurately reflect the content of your feed.

6. Be consistent (permanent) with your feed URL

If you subscribe to enough feeds, you’ll eventually encounter this scenario – after a few weeks of inactivity on a particular feed, you decide to visit the site and see why there is no new content. Lo and behold, there is a message on the site stating that the feed URL has changed and everyone needs to re-subscribe. This is the case if you’re lucky. Unfortunately, you often end up seeing a broken feed icon (or some similar type of indicator) in your feed reader. Worst case, you never receive any message at all. This is frustrating. This will make you lose readers. Remember, with today’s information overload, your readers will not hesitate to remove your feed for good. Don’t give them a good reason to do so. The moral of the story is don’t change your feed URL and not tell your existing readers.

The best part about this tip is how easy it is to implement. If it becomes necessary to change your feed’s URL for any reason (usually new software-related), simply publish a feed item with specific instructions (and apologies) for your existing readers. Provide them the new URL, explain why the change was necessary, and offer an apology for the inconvenience. If you do these three steps, your readers are much more likely to follow the feed to its new location.

In addition, despite the popularity of services like FeedBurner, you may want to consider owning your feed URL completely. For example, this blog uses FeedBurner yet the feed URL listed everywhere on this site is www.tmarkiewicz.com/feed/  I use a WordPress plugin to give FeedBurner a randomized feed URL that forwards all the feed traffic through them. If I ever decide to use another feed service, I can move my feed without any friction whatsoever. My readers will never see the change.

7. Ensure your feed URL is accessible

Make the feed URL easily accessible and readable – don’t place it in a JavaScript popup (for example: weblog.podnova.com) or hide it behind multiple web pages. If potential subscribers have to click through numerous pages just to find the link to your feed, chances are they may never subscribe at all. This is related to feed publisher tip #2 – don’t hide your subscription URL. So, in addition to making your feed URL easy to find, make sure that the link is accessible. Don’t promote a link on the front of your web site that makes the average visitor jump through hoops until they finally can find the actual feed URL. Simple and prominent should be your mantra when promoting your feed’s subscribe link.

More posts in the series:

Tips for Publishing RSS feeds series – Part 1, Part 2

Back in September, I wrote about my panel proposal for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival. I’m pleased to announce my panel “Using RSS for Marketing” was accepted last month. Now that the panel is set with a time and some great speakers, I decided to provide the details for those interested in attending SXSW this year.

The panel is set for Sunday, March 11, 2007 from 10-11am. Our speakers include:

Emily Chang – Ideacodes, eHub

Greg Reinacker – NewsGator

John Jantsch – Duct Tape Marketing

Bill Flitter – Pheedo

Look for some posts in the upcoming months as we bounce some ideas off our readers to see if we can enhance the value and content of this panel. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know.

SXSW also has a list of the confirmed speakers and panels for the event.

Nial Kennedy has an excellent post on feed publishing best practices. Nial’s more technical article on feed publishing makes an excellent companion to my general purpose series on tips for publishing RSS feeds. He covers RSS versus Atom, the different namespaces, types of parsers, and ping just to name a few of the subjects.

This is the second post in my Tips for Publishing RSS feeds series. If you missed the first part, you can find it here. Today, let’s just jump right into publishing tips 2, 3, and 4. As always, feel free to comment and add your thoughts on these tips. Also, for the sake of clarity, when I refer to a feed publisher I’m using the term in the broadest possible context including all bloggers. Many new bloggers don’t even realize they are syndicating their content via feeds when they start, so these tips are meant for everyone. Thus, some may be on the more general side.

2. Don’t hide your feed URL

As a web publisher, if you’re offering content as feeds, please don’t hide the subscription addresses. Take some time and consideration on where the feed URL is placed on the web site. All too often, much work is placed into offering feeds only to have the subscribe links and icons buried at the bottom of the web page or hidden somewhere in the sidebar. The method by which visitors can subscribe to your feed must be obvious.

Make it easy to find the feed URL on your web site (or anywhere else you promote your content such as your email newsletter). This one should be common sense, yet so many web sites treat the feed as an afterthought. Let’s make a few basic assumptions and assume that you want more feed subscribers.  If you want readers to subscribe to your feed, it has to be very easy to find. This sounds quite basic, but observe how random the placement of the feed URL has become. I’m not suggesting there should be a standard for the placement of the subscribe link. I am recommending, though, that as a publisher you make it very obvious to every visitor that you a have a better way for them to stay up to date with your content.

RSS feeds are starting to really move into the mainstream. Let’s not make it harder for users to adopt feeds by hiding the mechanism for subscription. To make this easier, most new web browsers provide visual cues in the browser when feeds are available on a web page. This feature is referred to as auto-discovery. To take advantage of this functionality, be sure to use auto-discovery code on each web page that has a feed.

The auto-discovery code is simply a line of HTML placed between the <head></head> tags of each web page that tell the browser what feeds are associated with the site. Here is an example:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”http://www.feedcraft.com/feed/evolvepoint/
EvolvePoint+News”>

By implementing auto-discovery, you make it much easier for visitors to find and add your feed. This process is so easy, I’m now accustomed to looking at the far right side of the address bar in Firefox when I’m looking to subscribe to a site’s content. Why? It’s a consistent location in the browser. One click and the feed is added to my reader. This ease of use is what you want as a feed publisher.

Finally, be sure to ask your visitors to subscribe. Another no-brainer, right? Well, not quite. Every web visitor still does not know what “subscribe” or “syndicate” or “feed” even means. Placing a prominent text link or an image with the feed URL is a great start, but it may still not be enough. Just as email marketers have pioneered and tested the method of attracting email subscribers, feeds are no different. Make an explicit call to action on your web site for readers to subscribe to your feed, giving them a few of the great reasons to do so.

3. Pick a single feed specification

This issue is starting to fade away, but not quite fast enough. Even if you have you content available for syndication in multiple formats, don’t give you web visitors the option to choose between them. The average visitor to your web site doesn’t know the technical differences or benefits between feed formats such as RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0. They don’t know the differences nor should they even care. The only result of having multiple feed formats displayed is more confusion on the part of potential new subscribers. You don’t want to drive them away in frustration.

If you must offer multiple feeds formats, do it through auto-discovery code. Those subscribers who have a preference will still have the choice when they subscribe to your feed, while the average user will not likely notice the difference. 

Offer one type of feed on your web site. Pick a format you prefer and go with it. I’m not here to promote one over the others. If your publishing software offers you multiple versions, simply pick the most recent of either RSS or Atom and you can’t go wrong with any of the available feed readers out there.

The feed specification doesn’t matter to the subscriber as they will still be getting the same essential content regardless.

4. Check the validation of your feed

Whether you’re coding your feed by hand or generating feeds through your blog or content management system, be sure to check that the feeds are valid according to the specification you use. An easy way to check feed validation is to use a free service like FeedValidator or the W3C Feed Validation Service. Simply enter your feed URL into the box, click submit, and you’ll receive a full report your feed’s validation. If there are any warnings or errors, these validation services will point them out and explain some likely causes for the issues. Fixing some of the problems you may find, though, is beyond the scope of this post. That being said, it’s better to know what the issues are rather than being ignorant of their existence. Often, the problems you’ll find are warnings that may cause some subscribers problems, but the feed is still valid. You may need to take the report and either do some research on a what to fix or hand it off to a competent developer for the solution.

More posts in the series:

Tips for Publishing RSS feeds series – Part 1, Part 3