Marketers still don't get RSS

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Adam Young — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 18:08:00 GMT

I'm sure that as soon as the marketers become RSS-savvy, we'll start seeing more sites forcing you to register to receive "targeted" RSS content, and the messages will come with inline advertising (e.g. you subscribe to a news site, and get dozens of messages from the site's sponsors along with your news headlines). Not good.

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Alex Barnett — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 18:21:00 GMT

Adam, not good, but then you have a choice.

If you think the ads are too much, then delete the feed. If you don't want to register, don't. The 'market' will decide what's right, right...?

Alex.

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Uwe Keim — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 20:54:00 GMT

Hm, I doubt that "the market will decide what's right". I more would expect everyone to ad ads to RSS, then.

If your thoughts would be correct, no one every would need popup-blockers or spam filters. Or do you know someone who WANTS these things? :-)

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Claude — Wed, 29 Dec 2004 21:42:00 GMT

Hm, Uwe, when we all *do* have popup blockers and spam filters, there will be no more reason to create popups and send spam mail. That's what he meant by "the market ...".

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Anonymous Coward — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 01:35:00 GMT

> With RSS feeds, you can reach a
> willing and waiting audience --
> without worrying about spam filters
> or inbox clutter.

Until the signal to noise ratio in RSS content starts approaching that of e-mail...

The willing and waiting audience will unsubscribe from the feed as soon as the content turns into targeted advertising.

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Peter Hoskins — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 14:28:00 GMT

RSS feeds are destined to become spam with another name if some filter/abstraction capability is not added to the mix. If every site is an RSS feed into your aggregator then the "convenience" of aggregation is the same as the convenience of drinking from a fire hose. If you subscribed to my Blog you would get everything I write - movie reviews, stories about my kids, my views on enterprise software, RSS, Podcasting, blah, blah, blah. You might only care about my views on movies but will have to sort through the full feed to find what you are interested in. RSS subscription needs another layer of abstraction to be useful or we will find ourselves talking about the same thing a few years from now.

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Alex Barnett — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 18:32:00 GMT

Thanks for your comments Peter.

to quote you:
>>> "If you subscribed to my Blog you would get everything I write - movie reviews, stories about my kids, my views on enterprise software, RSS, Podcasting, blah, blah, blah. You might only care about my views on movies but will have to sort through the full feed to find what you are interested in." <<<<

The simplest way of resolving this by having seperate RSS feeds/channels categorised by content topics.

2 examples of this...

Lockergnome.com (http://channels.lockergnome.com) and ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com/html/z/xml.html) each have over 40 seperate feeds according to subject/topics.

This approach solves the clutter/targetting issue you mention above.

Apologies if I've missed the point.

Alex.

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Peter Hoskins — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 15:16:00 GMT

No you are on point but the channel metaphor is ultra limiting. Seperating feeds in to channels is the logical first step but in reality the split feeds still have the same problem. ZDNet went from 1 feed to eventually 40 but within any one of the 40 there still might be a subset of the information I truly want and maybe it lives within 2 different channels. Using the movie analogy, I may be interested in movies but only action movies but then only action movies with Bruce Willis. Think of how TiVo approaches the problem of helping people find TV shows they want to watch. I can watch a certain channel or only certain shows on whatever channel they happen to be on as well as certain actors in certain shows on whatever channel they happen to be on. The filtering has near infinite permutations that allow me to define exactly the type of TV I want to record and watch. RSS filtering state of the art is limited to categories only (as far as I can tell anyway).

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Alex Barnett — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 15:43:00 GMT

Peter, I see where you are coming from here.

We are having some success with MSDN Connection in UK.

Have a play, let me know if this is the kind of thing you mean.

See:
http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2004/09/19/231385.aspx

The site is at:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/preferences.aspx

re: Marketers still don't get RSS

Peter Hoskins — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 13:55:00 GMT

Alex - This approach is infinitely better than gross channels. RSS feed filtering has to evolve this way else we will be sipping from a fire hose. Now if we could get some hueristic profiling as well as keywords addd to a basic checkbox form then we are on to something. Thanks for pointing me to this.

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