RSS Content Syndication
With the continued growth of the Internet, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to keep up to date with all the information sources they are interested in. The Internet is a complex and rapidly changing environment and searching through known websites for new information takes a great deal of time. This is where RSS can help; with an RSS reader any Internet user can be told when the sites they are interested in have new content, without having to check each site. Also, free RSS reader services are readily available, which always helps to get new trends established! The growing popularity of RSS has great implications for both commercial and private use.
RSS will help businesses syndicate news to the web at a much faster rate. New content takes about two weeks to register with the present submission and link promotion processes. This takes too long for news stories, as by the time the page is listed the news section has moved onto different content. By releasing articles by RSS feed, businesses will be able to get more Google news listings, and keep subscribing customers up to date with their news, and industry news, via their RSS reader.
Taking this a step further, industry leaders could potentially evolve into the central news source for their industries. Many already collect relevant news items from around the web and supply that news to their employees and executive board. This can be extended to supply all this news through the one RSS feed, or by separating multiple feeds by subject, thereby supplying readers with all the news specific to their industry or interests.
Those businesses that provide RSS feeds will also be in a position to release timely counter stories when necessary, for example when stories about competitors or their industry go out in general news. This is also an excellent way for businesses to reply directly to any news article about them, as well as get their press releases out to a wider audience.
An RSS news feed could be used to send branded news to customers each day, keeping the company at the forefront of each customers mind and adding to brand recognition efforts. It could also syndicate the businesses news to the press as many journalists make extensive use of RSS feeds to keep up to date and to pick up on breaking news.
News articles can be published for reuse on other sites. Either the whole article, or a synopsis that the leads back to the main story on the home site, can be syndicated. The authors would retain the copy write of all articles and any site that used the article would have to link back to the originating site and provide full credits. This will allow businesses to softly advertise their expertise through news articles. It’s a valuable way to promote trust in businesses; recommendations from news sources rate amongst the most highly trusted after recommendations from colleagues and friends.
RSS content syndication is set to become a major trend in search patterns and we feel that companies of any size will reap benefits from getting involved with this as early as possible.
If you are interested in RSS for personal use, and do not currently subscribe to any RSS feeds, Google provide a free web based reader service called Google Reader, whilst still in beta testing it’s a relatively intuitive interface which can handle a large number of subscriptions effectively, the only immediately evident drawback can be a lag in adding new RSS subscriptions to your list. There are however many other, fully tested, blog and RSS readers available.
If you have any queries or would like further information on RSS, please don’t hesitate to contact us.