What is RSS (Really sImple Syndication) and why do I care?

by Mary-Frances Main

According to Wikipedia:

RSS is is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works-such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video-in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

As one of our clients put it, "you lost me at 'web feed formats' can you start over?".
If you have a blog, this is all fairly important and if you use our services here at Widget, you'll end up calling us to ask "where is my RSS feed" at some point, so pay attention!

Think newspapers. Syndication is quite simply broadcasting (an article or cartoon) for publication in many magazines or newspapers at the same time. Ironically, now this term is more often used regarding the content of websites than it is for newspapers.

Really simple syndication comes set up and ready to go on most blogs. On Blogger, for instance if you type in http://blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml the "feed" will usually automatically come up. That is, if you haven't changed settings, but we're assuming here you're a beginner and you don't go regularly mucking around in your publishing settings in the back end.

So, why is this important? Because this is how most of the web world "views" your feed. It puts your blog in a standardized format so about any service can read it and post it wherever they want.

Most social networking profiles (like Facebook, LinkedIn and Hootsuite) allow you to put your "feed" up on a page or in a profile area. So, then your friends and/or clients on that network can read your blog - right there and constantly get updated posts.
More importantly you, as a writer, don't have to republish your information over and over in different places.

This feed is also monitored by services like Google Reader or Bloglines. In these programs, you can plug in your favorite RSS feeds and they will let you know when something new comes up on these blogs. Embarrassingly, I monitor 329 blogs - but only roughly a third of them have new posts daily. Thus, the service saves me a lot of time going to a blog only to find there's nothing new there.

This is also how Yahoo and Google put "top headlines" on their pages - they crawl through RSS feeds and find the most popular of the newsfeeds to give you constantly updated "popular" stories. This is also why sometimes it's about a top actor in the movie Avatar even though we all feel Haiti deserves more popular attention.

The site - feedburner.com - is a great one because now that Google has bought it, it interacts with Google Analytics and Google AdWords to help you maximize your blog performance, but maybe that's a subject for another article?

So, hopefully you're not overwhelmed, but feel free to email me any questions and I'll try to clarify any of these points!

Social Networking for Old People and bear with me

A friend of mine posted a link to this Salon article on Facebook and I think it's a good lesson for any of us who are "old" (keep in mind on Facebook that's OVER 22). It's a really good article and a good lesson for people who are beginning to dabble in Facebook.

On that subject, I'm starting a series of classes. I offered our first one on Facebook and LinkedIn as a test and I think the next one coming will be a 3 or 4 part blogging course.

Stay tuned!

6 Points to a Successful Blog

This is an article from one of our past newsletters:

1. Choose a topic that you know, like, and are passionate about. This way you will never get bored and will keep your audience always interested and asking for more.
2. Open a Blogger account. It is free and easy to use. You can also use the free WordPress accounts or if you're more internet savvy install Wordpress and host it yourself. Blogger is owned by Google though and because of this, in my experience, you run higher onsearch engines.
3. Almost always post a picture with a blog entry! It adds interest and color. You can easily load photos free with Webshots or Flickr . They can be items, arty, family (crop and be artsy if you want) or whatever relates to your topic.
4. In your blog's sidebar, create links related to your topic. It looks bare without them and it creates more usable content for your readers.
5. Post, post, post! Two or three times a week is ideal. Once a week is the borderline minimum that I recommend to keep your audience engaged and maintain adequate visibility in the search engines. You can "pre-write" posts and post them as you go along. Most blog sites allow you to write drafts - post when you're ready!
6. Make comments on other people's blogs. They will most certainly come to your blog to say hi or see who you are. Community is what's most important in blogging and there are a LOT of blogs out there. Set yours apart from the rest!