personal information, you can unsubscribe at
will. Publishers are going to recognize that fast, that the consumer's now
finally in control in an RSS environment.
JH But if you
read RSS feeds rather than actually visiting the blog, aren't you missing out
on some of the features of blogs such as the ability to post comments?
BF It depends how you
format your RSS feed. Are you doing full post or are you driving customers back
to your website? It's a delivery tool for content. That
still can be interactive depending on how you format your RSS feed. But you're
right, you do lose some of that but if I still want to make a comment I go back
to the website.
JH Is there any
downside to using blogs as a marketing tool?
BF The expense for a
weblog is keeping it up, it's the content. The tools are cheap enough right
now. If you want it to succeed and establish yourself, you need to do regular
posts and you need to keep it updated and fresh. So the kind of magic number I
use is about 50 posts a month for a larger company, if they want to grow the
traffic. Maybe a small business could do two or three posts a week. It doesn't
always have to be original content. It could be commenting on someone else's
content or even about the space you're in - talk about the particular news
that's going on in the space that you are involved in.
JH What about
RSS and advertising? How does that work?
BF You can opt in to
get ads into your RSS feeds. We have a service that monitors your feeds and
helps you understand the traffic in your feeds. We also insert ads to help you
monetize your content.
JH How do you think
RSS will develop in the future?
BF I honestly think
it will grow exponentially over the next few years. Again, it's just a clean
channel to deliver content and as consumers find out how easy it is to use. The
big hurdle was in the beginning to understand what to do. You click on those
little orange boxes scattered around the web and get to this ugly looking page
full of code. Most people think the page must be broken. They don't know what
to do with RSS but that will change and I think it will grow exponentially
because it's so easy to use, so easy to unsubscribe from. Microsoft will make
it a feature of their browser. My Yahoo is making it more popular. Most people
on My Yahoo don't even know they're using RSS. I think that the term RSS will
be in the background.
JH There are
two competing standards, aren't there? Is Atom a different thing altogether?
BF Yes, I use RSS
kind of generically to mean content syndication. It's like the debate we had
over VHS and Betamax in the seventies for VCRs. Atom might be a better format
but RSS seems to be winning.
JH I've had
some other interviewees say that they don't visit blogs any more. If you don't
have an RSS feed, you don't exist as far as they are concerned.
BF That's basically how
I look at it too. I only consume content via RSS. I get no e-mail newsletters
any more, it's all RSS.
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