in this issue

• Company news :: IFEX cracks 1 million; launches for Toronto Training Board, Ontario Association of Youth Employment Centres, Possibilities Project and IFEX (again)
• Feature :: RSS Web feeds equal net gains
• By the numbers :: RSS in a nutshell
• Cool tools :: an RSS reader for the rest of us
• Quote, unquote :: RSS and the small site a perfect match
  

Company news

It's been another busy quarter here at Xaccute. Before I get to the run-down, though, I want to congratulate our client the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX). This quarter marks the one-year anniversary of the Xaccute-designed and built re-launch of their Web site. And what a year - site traffic has increased to more than 10 times what it was before the re-launch, completely blowing away our projections with the site serving more than 1 million page views every month to English, French and Spanish-speaking users.

Here's a quick list of the client projects we've completed over the last couple of months:

• An online news service for the Toronto Training Board that allows the Board to update content from any Web browser and to seamlessly share content with their partners.
• An online news service and an online events listings service for Ontario Association of Youth Employment Centres that allows the client to update content from any Web browser and to seamlessly share content with their partners.
• An online news service and an online events listings service for the Possibilities Project that allows the client to update content from any Web browser and to seamlessly share content with their partners.
• An enhanced site search engine for IFEX that makes it easier for users to find what they're looking for, especially on IFEX' French and Spanish- language sites.
  

Visit our Web site for more information about our projects.

Feature :: RSS Web feeds equal net gains

Increasingly, clients are asking me about ways to draw traffic to their Web sites, help their newsletters cut through inbox clutter and share information with their partners. It makes sense - those are the questions near to the heart of just about anyone using the Internet as a serious part of their communications mix. And, in a lot of cases, those questions have a three-letter answer in common: RSS.

Short for Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary, depending on who's asking and whom you ask), RSS is an XML-based format for content distribution. It was once mainly a way for 'bloggers to share content updates among themselves and with a handful of sites that collect 'blog content. But all that's changing. New tools are emerging - including the latest version (7.5) of the Opera Web browser - that make reading RSS feeds as easy as reading email for the average user and that supercharge its potential for enterprises and other organizations.

Read more ...

By the numbers :: RSS in a nutshell

• 3,000 - Factor by which RSS usage has increased on the Christian Science Monitor's Web site since 2002.
• 10,000-15,000 - Number of page views that RSS feeds drive to (New York Times Corp- owned) boston.com each week.
• 1:1 - Ratio of traffic to driven to nytimes.com stories by RSS feeds versus traffic driven by the site's home page.

(Source: RSS Feeds Can Build Web Traffic, but Fence Sitters Note Problems. Online Journalism Review. June 4, 2004. http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1086293132.php )

Cool tools :: an RSS reader for the rest of us

What better way to start to get a feel for RSS than to subscribe to a few feeds yourself.

There are a couple of alternative types of feed readers designed for individuals - Web-based; where you access a Web site to read a list of feeds that you can customize; stand-alone applications that do the same thing, but as a desktop application; built- ins, such as the news reader now included with the Opera Web browser and plug-ins designed for popular desktop software like MS Outlook. And since most people already use Outlook anyway, the plug-in route is often the best way to go.

Personally, I prefer the free but somewhat more difficult to use IntraVnews RSS reader plug-in for Outlook. But for people who are less willing to geek out and more willing to part with a couple of bucks (about US$30), NewsGator is a great way to go. It's easy to set up, easy to use, supports all the major RSS standards and runs inside Outlook, which you're probably already using anyway. There's a free 14-day trial period, and I've found that uninstalling after that is pretty straightforward. Also, as the NewsGator folks go to pains to point out, they're not affiliated with the spyware-spewing Gator Corporation in any way.

Quote, unquote :: RSS and the small site a perfect match

"RSS is of great value to the Monitor, as a smaller newspaper: in an aggregator, the Monitor's headlines are on an equal playing field with those of much larger news organizations. Since we know that we're not the only newspaper that a user reads, anything which helps a user read more newspapers is beneficial to us. Most of our users start a visit to csmonitor.com by clicking on a link from somewhere else, often a site that aggregates news like Yahoo, Google, or AOL. So the experience of a user who uses an RSS-based aggregator is no different. A much larger, more famous brand news site probably gets mosts of its users starting a session on the home page, but I suspect most smaller sites are in the same situation as we are. Anything that can get our headlines in front of more users more regularly is important."

- Joel Abrams, Partnership Development Specialist, csmonitor.com

(Source: Industry leaders on RSS. Online Journalism Review. http://ojr.org/ojr/technology/1086301125.php )