No doubt you have seen the little orange icon pop up in various places on the Internet. To those considered “tech-savy” it’s been around for some time but I run into people every day who don’t know what in the world RSS is. I got to thinking the other day that the concept has been around for some time but has existed in different forms. We have probably seen the old movies where the nervous stock broker monitors a “stock-ticker” or ticker tape machine which spits out updates on the stocks of concern. Another visual of times past we have is the news tickers that circled buildings in New York City announcing man’s first landing on the moon. We see a similiar thing on TV called the “crawl” in which headlines will be displayed in the lower third of the TV screen. This has been used in the past for severe weather alerts.

Now this form of delivering information is becoming more and more common place on the Internet as we get swamped with more and more information. To some it may “appear” that I am visiting web sites on a constant basis based on how quickly I reply on forums, blogs, etc. The truth is I am not the one going to the web site but my assistant, the “news reader” or RSS reader is going to the sites for me at specific time interval and delivering the content to me as if it were an e-mail message except it’s just there to be read. If I need to respond I go to the web site itself from a link in the RSS feed. This saves a lot of time however as close to 95% of the RSS feeds that get downloaded to my computer are ignored but I can quickly scan through them and pick what is most important to me to respond to.

More and more if you want people to return to your web site on a regular basis you need to provide a reason for people to come in the form of new products, news or opinions. If you are having problems attracting new and repeat visitors to your web site please consider how you can make the best use of RSS technology. Yes, I do wish their was a better name for it.

Technorati Tags: communications, rss

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Internet, RSS, Tips, blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.