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10 Things You Can Do with Mixed Media RSS

splashcastmedia.com — RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, has played a huge role in making the internet what it is today. It ’s made blogs and podcasts subscribable, it’s taken search to a new level and it’s changed the way many people read news. The web continues to change, though, and our use of RSS can change as well.

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  • mtb167, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4This is bookmarkable for any marketer.
    • MBarnwell, on 10/12/2007, -12/+1Whats a good open source/free RSS reader for the Mac OS?..please and thank you.

      (Sorry for the off-topic post, Google Reader is good but I'd love an app)
    • CapnOats, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0Personally, I use RSSOwl.

      I use it at work on my Windows box, but I haven't tried it on my Mac at home yet. It's Java, so I can't see any reason it shouldn't work.

      Edit:
      Apparently it works on Windows, Linux, Mac & Solaris.
    • nixfu, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1http://www.netvibes.com for the win
    • mrgoat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1why?

      what does it actually say about marketing via RSS?

  • drewolanoff, on 06/10/2008, -7/+1we're just really now learning what we can do with rss, sky is the limit!
  • jackzhack, on 10/12/2007, -8/+0when will they come out with a system like an rss feed which you can subscribe to and get your dating match every minute with out the nasty e-mail. http://www.speedateauction.com/default.asp
  • FatalFantasy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+18Actually, RSS has played a relatively small role in today's internet.
  • creepysleepy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I really do like SplashCast but this post smells a LOT like spam...
  • eth3l, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Nice.
  • edstate, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14I've tried... but can't seem to catch the RSS fever. Am I missing something?
    • extratired, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2my thoughts exactly, until I found a good reader! + I use a firefox plugin so I don't have to start up some other program to read my feeds and go back and forth between windows.
    • Homunculiheaded, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I go back and forth with RSS being useful for getting news, for a few months I'll be absolutely addicted and then I'll go for months without ever checking.

      However I think RSS has a lot of potential as a way to grab website content packaged in easily parsable XML. If you want to import data from one website into another it's great to just grab the feed and navigate to the appropriate tags. It's easy to imagine a variety of programs using that data in useful ways, and it's a lot faster than writing a screen scraper or something similar for every website you want to extract data from.

      I think RSS still has a lot of potential, but people greatly over estimate how many people make use of RSS feeds and people are only now just starting to really make use of these feeds beyond simply pluging them into a news reader.
    • spinchange, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ edstate,
      the thing of it is, you can pull info from various disparate sources and bring it together in one place. It's self-updating too.
      here is an example (which is admittedly my own and has some ads so you can't say I didn't warn ya, I'm not try to "spam," here everyone)
      http://resspectmeme.googlepages.com

      It may not seem like much, but it's a live feed of Digg.com front page stories, Del.icio.us front page stories, and Techmeme stories blended and upated.

      Those are are my top 3 sites, anyway. Otherwise, I have limited coding experience.
      The ability to "blend" information from your favorite sources is very cool in concept, but even cooler in application! Mixed Media is next.
    • spinchange, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i don't know how i misspelled my own damn URL, but i did:
      http://RSSpectMeme.Googlepages.com
  • ramageki, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Creepysleepy,
    Most spam isn't as helpful and informative as this post.
  • rkudasik, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1Interesting commercial...
  • nicepants, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3Must...digg.....list...of...things....
  • glenneroo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3yay great....

    - rant -
    its just a shame that too many RSS readers still suck ass. Thunderbird RSS support is flakey and full of bugs and IMHO RSS support belongs in your mail program moreso than your browser, i find the RSS plugins kludgey and annoying and if you try to open them all in tabs, they take over all your other (previously opened) tabs. And yes i've tried soooo many programs, and they all just seem to be so annoying, and ANOTHER program running 24/7 along with my mail? ugh.. i've always got between 10-30 apps open (dev tools, etc) can't be bothered ;) Firefox still leaks memory (and crashes) (in windows) when recycling lots of tabs, so i shut it down when i'm not using it, which is not practical IMO for RSS reading as they get polled (kinda) like mail...

    anyways whatever i really dont think most people even know what RSS is or how to use it. On average, 1 out of 100 people i know uses it... i _try_ to use it but annoyance factor usually wins me over... *shrug*
    - / rant -
  • fuzzybad, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4RSS is a perfect fit for a browser, not an email client or other program. Think about it, RSS basically provides links to web sites, so the end result is using a web browser to read the full article.

    I used to be a big fan of Firefox Live Bookmarks, but I've recently moved to Google Reader. Their clean, effective interface provides an excellent way to keep up with the news. In fact, I read this Digg article from an RSS link using it!

    http://www.google.com/reader
    • 2xxii, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0I RSS digg/technology in google reader as well. It's effective enough.
  • Sal4, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1Awesome! I just picked up the season 1 DVD box a few days ago, on a whim, the box set looked good, and I heard good things about the show, so I thought I'd just pick it up and see if I liked it. Been completely addicted to it since the first episode and am working through the box set basically as fast as I can, heh. It's definitely one of the best shows I've seen in a long time.
  • iambuzzin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Wait, wait, wait.. So they're like combining stuff into one feed with RSS??!! That's amazing, how do you do it?
  • snowbusiness, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1As a publisher RSS sucks. Its incredibly hard to make money from. The only thing nice about it is that you can drive more visitors to your site. You can also keep people from visiting your site as well though :(
  • raid517, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4It drives me crazy that so many people just don't get the value of MMRSS (particularly streaming RSS). It is so Internet 1.0 to have an aggregation of video/audio/news links that can't be streamed via RSS.

    RSS gives us the capacity to skip the large media companies and have our own IPTV (and radio) the way we want it to be. Properly utilised, it enables us to watch and listen to whatever we might wish to watch and listen to, whenever we might wish to, in a way that meets our own potentially highly unique and personalised needs.

    You want a web site that can host all your favorite Video/audio feeds, link to and stream your entire music collection via RSS, connect to a bunch of diverse locations to organise your doccuments, your callender, your appointments and stream your photo collection to your mobile device, keep you updated on the latest news with news feeds and highlights from top news stations around the world? You can do it all - and much much more (your imagination really is the only limit) via streaming RSS. RSS is literally the 'web your way' - as lame as it may sound to some, it is part of the vision that many have had of a day when the Internet will become completely personalised to match your tastes and your exact interests, so that everyone's Internet experience will be unique and specific only to them. I personally don't think it's lame at all - I just think that the people who do think the whole Web 2.0 thing is lame, just haven't had the time, or the inclination to consider it's real implications yet. I think once you do start to mess about with the whole web 2.0 thing - you will quickly come to appreciate how doing things any other way really does seem primitive by comparison.

    But man, you guys need to get with the program. If you see a service that offers video/audio/image links, ask them why it isn't streamable via RSS, try where possible to embrace those services that do offer RSS streaming and make them popular and try to tell your friends about RSS and web 2.0 - and do your best to explain to them why it is important and why it is significant. Otherwise the web and progress in general is likely to flounder - and we will be no further along in 10 years from where we are today.
  • iwilker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Another great thing about this is that you don't have to commit yourself to regular production of video or audio content to spit out a busy feed.

    I have clients who make video and audio content but just aren't there yet, in terms of being able to consistently manage a vlog/podcast post once a week. However, they're cranking out lots of text content. This just gives such people the means to augment text content with rich media stuff, when they have it.

    As for those who don't see the value of RSS: if you don't know, you better aks someone. Yes, it's hard to monetize but web feeds and the distributed publishing they enable are about to jump, emphatically, from geekdom to mainstream. Don't get left on the outside looking in at the "live web" -- you'll be dead in the water in a year if you're not giving your users feeds and finding a niche in an emergent distributed-publishing economy.
  • binorgog, on 08/07/2008, -1/+0I feel RSS is an amazing tool for organizations to use for support. Users and Department heads can get useful updates regarding support. Since M$ built RSS into Outlook 2007, there is a lot of money to be made now for someone to capitalize on making RSS the com tool of choice internally. IMHO
  • chancefl, on 07/15/2008, -0/+1Actually, RSS has played a relatively small role in my dating site http://www.loveawake.com
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