With 20 percent of respondents to a recent Globe and Mail poll claiming to regularly, personally access content through an RSS reader, new back-office applications being released almost daily and organizations like the BBC, the Canadian federal government, Reuters and the New York Times all offering RSS-based feeds you’ve got to at least consider what RSS can do for you.

So what can RSS do for you?

In terms of public-facing applications, you can:

• Replace or augment email newsletters and other permission-based email campaigns with RSS feeds. Unlike email, users only receive the RSS content they ask for so you won’t have to compete with spam and viruses for attention and trust. (Fruition will be launching an RSS version of this newsletter in Fall 2004).

• Keep users updated in real-time about content updates on your site with RSS. Reuters, for instance, is using direct to consumer RSS feeds (including video!) as a key part of its strategy of pulling away from its news feeds to portals like Yahoo! and focusing instead on driving traffic towards its own news portal.

• Advertise on RSS feeds. Although this market is still in its pioneering stages, there’s already at least one RSS-based ad network (RSSAds.com).

For partner-facing applications, you can:

• Keep your channel partners informed about promotions and products with RSS feeds. Sure, you could do this with email, too, but besides cutting through the clutter, RSS feeds can easily be integrated into partners’ intranets and customer-facing Web sites.

• Share content with partner Web sites. Canada’s Globe and Mail, among others, has been doing this for years. Although they don’t make their RSS feeds available directly to the general public, the Globe does make feeds available to select partner sites (and the selection criteria aren’t all that rigid, either). Visitors to those partner sites see news item headlines and summaries and are able to click through to the items’ full content on the Globe’s own site.

• Networks of small non-profit organizations can use RSS feeds to keep each other informed about important news, events and other developments and to coordinate strategies and tactics.

And for enterprise-facing applications, you can:

• Track media coverage of your company, campaigns and competitors by aggregating and filtering RSS feeds from multiple media sources. You can even publish the filtered feeds on your intranet to keep your whole organization in the loop.

• Aggregate content from your different departments and divisions on your enterprise-wide intranet portal to break down organizational silos.

• Aggregate content from your suppliers to streamline procurement.

• Replace your company newsletter with RSS feeds.

For all its capabilities, RSS does have some downside, though.

First, there’s the whole standards issue. At last count (and depending on how you count), there were roughly 7 different, incompatible versions of the RSS standard. And that’s not even counting Atom, a similar — but different-enough — technology. Web publishers need to decide whether to support all 7 or so versions of the standard — providing 7 different feeds of the same content — or whether to save on upfront costs and only support a subset. That kind of decision requires in-depth knowledge of both the technical and marketplace implications of each version of the standard.

Then there’s the server load issue. Software that reads RSS feeds usually checks for updates to your feeds — downloading an entire copy of the feed in the process — roughly once an hour. If your feeds are text only, that’s probably not going to kill you or your server. But if you’re serving up audio, video or lots and lots of images — watch out.

There are technologies being developed that aim to reduce the load on servers from RSS feeds, but they aren’t commercially available yet and probably won’t be for another year or so. In the meantime, estimating and budgeting for additional server loads — to some degree — should be part of your RSS deployment plan.

Some publishers, as well, worry that offering RSS feeds makes it too easy for their competitors to get their hands on their information. Some newspaper publishers, for instance, are concerned that publishing RSS feeds will make it too easy for competing news portals to re-publish their headlines. But these concerns are largely hypothetical worries from people who are still on the sidelines of RSS deployment. People who have actually put RSS to work are finding the opposite — RSS doesn’t damage traffic and revenue, it enhances it. A lot. Plus, if there’s feed content you absolutely, positively only want to share with a select group of partners, you can always password-protect it.

RSS isn’t the perfect tool for every content-sharing and syndication need — some, more-complex requirements are best met by bigger, stronger members of RSS’ XML-based Web services family, like SOAP and XML-RPC — and successful RSS initiatives do require some forethought and expertise. But RSS is generally an excellent, low-cost way to boost your site — and your organization’s — productivity and bottom line. I recommend that just about everyone at this stage should be at least looking at RSS to see what it can do for them.

Last modified: June 14, 2004