[This is a teaser of a post. I have original research data about RSS usage to report, but I ramble on and on first and only deliver the goods in the last paragraph.]

I’ll admit it, when I first discovered RSS, I was all excited about it, too. I even gave in to the hype and joined the popular speculation that RSS might be a viable alternative to email for marketing purposes. But then, like the guy in Monty Python’s Holy Grail who complained of having been turned into a newt, I got better.

Frankly, I’ve always been a bit underwhelmed by RSS. I know that’s not cool to admit (the gals over at BigBlogCompany will probably get their panties in a bunch to hear me say it), but there it is. Yeah, in principal it’s great, but having tried several RSS syndication apps, I haven’t been impressed with the execution. The main thing I hate about most of them is the ephemeral quality of posts: if you let a few days go by without checking in on your feeds, the older items scoll off into the ether, and if you want to go back and look at old links, you’re SOL. I did love NewsGator when I first discovered it and even paid the $30 for it. The idea of having RSS feeds turn into email messages really clicked for me. The only problem is I don’t use Outlook for my email. I’m a Eudora user and have been for many years and I’ll give up on Eudora in favor of Outlook when you pry it from my cold dead hands. For a while, I was using Outlook exclusively for my NewsGator RSS feeds, but somehow I couldn’t keep up the momentum of regularly using yet another Internet communications app; I haven’t checked my NewsGator feeds for months.

But I do have a point here aside from just my own lukewarm experience with RSS. I just came across a post titled Seven Reasons to Switch from EMail Marketing to RSS Advertising on Pheedo.info. Bill (whose last name is not apparent on the site; what’s up with that?) gives these seven reasons to back up his thesis:

1. Sender ID
2. CAN SPAM ACT
3. Blacklists
4. Known Sender
5. Email Filters
6. Bonded Sender Program
7. Cost of Sending Email

(Bill’s orignal post on Pheedo has links on all of those reasons for more context.)

I don’t get this. Aside from Blacklists, those all seem to me like reasons to stick with email marketing, signs that legit marketers are going to triumph over spammers in the end, or at least competitive advantages they have now to distinguish themselves from spam. Frankly, I’m happy to go on record predicting that spam is on the retreat. I firmly believe in 2-3 years, spam will be much less of a problem for email users and legit marketers compared to today.

But, more to the point, switching from email to RSS? Don’t be a fool. By all means, introduce RSS. Despite my personal lack of fascination with RSS, I do believe it has a role to play and a more promising future, even if that may not be in the near future. Note that the post I linked to above (on MarketingVox) where I had given into dreaming of a time when RSS may present an alternative to email, I was writing in the context of Microsoft saying it will introduce an RSS reader into its Longhorn operating system. When Microsoft comes out with a free RSS reader, particularly one built into the OS, then I think RSS will go mainstream. What they should really do, in my opinion, is buy NewsGator or just rip off the idea. But Longhorn isn’t due out till 2006, so let’s not hold our breath.

But here’s the kicker, the reason why I hope you made it all the way to the bottom of this rambling post. Why not kill your email program in favor of RSS today? Because virtually 100% of Internet users use email and virtually 0% of Internet users use RSS today. Sure, we all assume it’s not a lot of folks who use RSS, but I’ve got the actual number. This July, I conducted a survey for my client Quris, an email marketing services provider, of 2543 Internet users from Harris Interactive’s panel. I am still writing up the report for this research, so this is an unreported scoop, but I trust Quris won’t mind. One of the questions we asked was about various digital communications media and devices they use, including this choice:

I use a “news aggregator” to subscribe to websites (using “RSS” or another “XML” syndication language).

The response? Thirty-five people out of 2543 checked that option. That is 1.4% of the total, that five years after RSS has been available to the world.

Sure, go ahead and dump your email programs in favor of RSS. But don’t come crying to me when you realize how dumb of a choice that was.

Is it a humorous attempt to turn a weakness into a strength or a shameless promotional gimmick? You decide.

BizNetTravel’s Travel Log is a travel agency blog I help produce with Adrants‘ Steve Hall. We both suck at spelling. So, for the next two months, BizNetTravel is giving away travel guide books to folks who can find spelling errors and other language mistakes in Steve and my posts. Sadly, this applies only to the BizNetTravel’s site, not on our other sites. What do you think we are, made of travel books?

BizNetTravel: Find Spelling Errors, Win a Guide Book

Ross Mayfield and team over at SocialText, makers of an “enterprise social software” (which, as best I can understand, is some kind of hybrid blog and wiki platform for corporate knowledge management), has just closed a “series A” round of financing for an undisclosed sum from investors including VC of Neoteny and über blogger Joi Ito, social network LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and social network Tribe founder Mark Pincus.

I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with Ross on the phone a few times and exchanging several emails with and can attest he’s super smart. See for yourself: he blogs good stuff at about social networks and knowledge management at Ross.TypePad.com and Corante’s Many-to-Many.

Socialtext.com: Socialtext Closes Series A Financing

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post titled Promoting Your Blog with some advice about driving traffic to your blog. Since then, I came up with another really good technique: get Farked.

Here’s how you do it:

A) Write a funny post. This step is a doozie, because you may not be funny. Really what you need to do is find some original, offbeat content. Observe something that others haven’t about the world (e.g., a wacky business idea someone has put in place, as was my case recently — see below).

a1) Adding a picture of a scantily clad woman probably helps, as Adrants can attest.

B) Submit the link to your funny, scantily clad post to Fark and/or CollegeHumor. These sites, largely collections of funny links, get absolutely sick traffic.

C) Cross your fingers and hope they accept your submission for publication.

D) If they deem your post worthy and link to it, watch your traffic counter spin like a pin wheel in a hurricane.

I recently experienced this with BizNetTravel, a business blog I help a client publish on the travel sector. In my not-so-humble opinion, it’s quite a good blog that gets too little recognition and traffic for the effort I and Adrants’s Steve Hall put into it. The other day I wrote a post about a funny service called ScooterMan (click the link for details). As an afterthought, I added a picture of a woman in a bikini with a scooter (that I actually stole from someone else’s site who linked to my post). As another afterthought, I submitted the link to CollegeHumor.

I didn’t check the logs for a couple of days, but CollegeHumor published the link. Fark then picked up the link from CollegeHumor and also pointed to BizNetTravel.

KA-BOOM!!!

A site that normally gets a few hundred visitors (on a good day) suddenly got nearly 10,000 visitors on a Sunday. It’s slowed down since, naturally, but we’re still way over normal in the residual traffic. The link has also gotten picked up by many other smaller funny link sites.

Just thought I’d share that happy technique. 🙂

Cornell University’s PR department blogs the process of redesigning the university’s web site.

Link

Business 2.0’s senior writer Om Malik reports that Technorati, the popular blog search engine and tracking service, has taken $6.5 million in VC funding lead by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Steve Rubel and Matthew Podboy mull over what it means for PR professionals and media companies when bloggers, particularly those who are also professional journalists, use their blogs to scoop exclusives, ignoring traditional PR practices such as embargoing news.

Om Malik: Technorati Gets Fed VC Dollars

Thank you, thank you, thank you Blogger, for starting it all. Five years — ages ago, yet the blink of an eye.

Evhead: Happy Birthday Blogger

SignsNeverSleep.com is the blog of the Lincoln Sign Company, based in Lincoln, New Hampshire. It’s a charming blog, nicely designed (better, frankly, than the company’s main web site, if you ask me), and a neat mix of recently completed examples of the company’s work, a glimpse of the process of sign making in progress and personal news (a weekend hike, what J.D. is reading, a bear sighting, photos of the kids, etc.). J.D. Illes writes me:

We just recently started a weblog as the first stage in a whole redesign of our web-presence.  We are a small, custom-commercial signshop in a small resort community.

I think our blog will be a terrific tool to show our customers what it is we do.  Usually a customer comes by to visit just after we have spilled paint all over their sign by accident, not when we have just completed a beautiful project.  I am hoping giving them a peek inside our doors on a daily basis will help them get to know us.

…

Thanks

J.D. Iles

Thanks for the note, J.D., and best of luck!

UPDATE:
Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing Group read this post and was apparently so interested that he tracked down J.D. of Lincoln Signs for an interview about why he’s blogging.

Link

Insanely dumb. Just imagine how much more interest in the Olympics and the Olympians athlete blogs could spur.

CNN: Olympians largely barred from blogging

Rock Bruner
Internet consultant

MediaPost columnist Mark Naples doesn’t think that blogs rock, but he thinks that I do. More to the point, he thinks I am “Rock Bruner.”

Okay, I know he doesn’t really think that, as we know each other. The “i” and the “o” are next to each other on the keyboard after all. But I can’t resist mulling over all the personal slogans it suggests:

• Like a Rock!
• I rock!
• Rock on!
• Rick Rocks ‘n’ rolls!

Okay, it’s not that funny, but it’s been a long week.

As for the premise of his article — that he doesn’t see what the big deal is about blogs — needless to say I disagree. In fact, I’d venture to sound so 1997 as to say he “doesn’t get” blogs. (A sure sign: he thinks they’re pretty much like bulletin boards.) I’d love nothing more than to Fisk the article and point out all the reasons why blogs, and not I, indeed do rock, but I’m behind on a client deadline. So I invite all you other blog boosters to have a go at him.

MediaPost: On Blogocracy and Its Significance

BloggerCon is back, this time at Stanford University’s Law School, November 6th. Click the link in the headline of this post for details.

Link

Real Networks just started this blog to influence spin in the debate over its recent enabling of its downloadable music files to be played on Apple’s proprietary MP3 player iPod. Real is undercutting Apple’s 99 cent MP3s by selling its music library for only 49 cents each.
UPDATE:
As usual, it seems that I’ve missed the actual story here (the difference being this time I figured it out, sort of, on my own before a bunch of you left comments here calling me dense). It seems that Real started this site as a petition calling on Apple users to support its effort open up its file format to play on the iPod. But it underestimated the fanaticism of Apple users, some 1,000 of whom signed the petition with vile abuse aimed at Real. Details at Micro Persuasion.

Link

Zach Braff

I noted the other day that I thought blogs and movies were a great match. Here’s another example: the arty looking film from Fox Search Lights, Garden State, has a blog written by the movie’s star, writer and director, Zach Braff (best known for his role on NBC’s hospital comedy Scrubs). Nice to see that the official movie site links to the blog. I haven’t seen the film yet (though I plan to, set as it is set in my native homeland of suburban New Jersey), but it appears to be popular with both critics and movie goers.

Link

A few weeks ago, I linked to a survey that a student was conducting about business blogging. I haven’t yet heard back what were the results (though I did just send him a follow-up email today asking about it).

Meanwhile, here is another survey by a student on the topic of business bloggging. (That link is for people who have a business blog; if you don’t but you’re interested in the topic, there is another surve here.)

UPDATE:
I’ve heard back about the earlier survey I noted. Turns out they still haven’t gotten as many responses as they want, so they’re keeping that survey open. Be a sport, and give a click.

This sounds a bit dubious. The site’s funkily formatted homepage explains:

Blogversations are a new way to market. Here’s how it works: Advertisers sponsor bloggers to dicuss a topic or question. Bloggers earn $$. Advertisers engage turned-out audiences.

It continues on from there, but you get the basic idea. The homepage notes “advertorials not encouraged.” Not encouraged? How about not allowed? I’m not going to say this is necessarily evil; I’ll leave that to plenty of the rest of you, I’m sure. Certainly bears watching.

Link

Not to be outdone by Google’s blog, Yahoo just launched its own blog. The first post, a bit of self-congratulations about how great Yahoo’s search is, was written by Jeff Weiner, SVP of Yahoo! Search & Marketplace. From the sound of it, however, others will also join in the blogging:

Be sure to check back here for news about new product introductions, updates and exclusive betas.

In addition, this blog is designed to provide a window into what our team is thinking and doing, in their own words (and maybe some guest bloggers as well).

Above all else we hope this blog enables you to share our excitement for the search industry and what the future holds. 

Powered by Movable Type. Funny that they wouldn’t use Blogger, as it’s free

😉 

Comments are turned on and filling up fast.

ClickZ offers additional perspective.

Link

More of the usual evangelizism for everyone’s favorite “new” trend.

Globe & Mail: Blogs go big business

Hoot! Short of a “Kick Me” sign on your back, nothing quite says “I know nothing about the Internet” and assures that you will be soundly mocked online like an anti-deep linking policy. Apparently the folks behind Athens 2004, the offical site for the current Olympics, still use AOL or have only read about the Internet in airline magazines.

This is so 1996. These kinds of policies are laughably uninforcable — there has never been any legal precedent set in this regard — and they miss the critical point of the a web site: you want people to visit it, and other web sites that call attention to specific valuable content on your site (e.g., bloggers) are doing you a favor.

Just for giggles, here are some of their ridonkulous requirements for linking to pages of their site:

• “Use the term ATHENS 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent” (emphasis theirs; presumably that excludes terms such as fart or bring back the days of olive-oil slathered naked Oympic athletes!)
• “[You should] not associate the link with any image, esp. the ATHENS 2004 Emblem” (as shown above left; don’t do that)
• “Send a request letter to the Internet Department…” (How about you send a letter to my butt instead?)

If you want to tap blogs to help drive more traffic to you site, read this policy statement and then do the opposite. (Oh, and don’t use frames. Frames suck for bloggers trying to link to you. In fact, frames just suck, and have done so for many years.)

Link