<ttl> – thats “time to live” in RSS speak – or in other words, how many seconds before re-caching occurs. But you don’t really need to know that. There are programs coming out that enable you to write and send out your messages in RSS that will be picked up by news readers and aggregators like My Yahoo and Net News Wire.
Its 2005 and all of us should, by now, be FEEDING THE wwwURL by sending out our blog posts and other material through RSS feeds and Atom Feeds and whatever feeding system the Net invents next. The old method of forcing rather than feeding, especially the mass email strategy, is soooooo last millenium! Even with the provision of 1 Gig email boxes, it is still somewhat rude to send out a regular bulky email to thousands of people.
(UPDATE) However, we should be gracious to organizations who have exceled in mass mailings and we should also cater to those who still use email as their primary means of collecting information by “ADDING” RSS to our strategy. (Thanks Alan for your comment)
Your blog should send out RSS feeds and Atom feeds automatically, and respond to a few commands to send out the whole post, or just the headlines. One of the best things you will do for your blog this year will be to visit Feedburner.com and get the badges set up for automatic referral to My Yahoo and the other readers. This is what I did with mine. Its free and easy – just go and do it . . .
What about if you have information to publish but dont have a blog? Feeder is a new program for Mac that will be a help for some without blogs. What the best one for PC? Why dont you leave a comment and recommend one? Whatever you do, if you want to get your thoughts out to the world, then your strategy should involve FEEDING rather than FORCING and BEING FOUND over FINDING. And if you cant speak RSS, then get a translator.
More:
Getting started with RSS (link to article)
Lockergnome is a huge resource for RSS
Jordon Cooper wrote a good resource for TheOoze.com (havent got time to find the link)
I’m all for the use of RSS in everything. I’m trying to get a client to add RSS feeds for the monthly specials he emails out.
The keyword there is “add,” though. While many more people are becoming RSS savvy, there are still, believe it or not, many, many people who have never heard of RSS. I know the email list for my client is populated by many people like himself, and he had barely heard the term “blog,” and this was only a couple months ago when I started pushing for a coroporate blog (which would automatically come with an RSS feed because I use b2evolution). So maybe it’s rude not to offer the RSS option, but since you can opt-out of most mailing lists nowadays, I don’t think we’re at a place where we should abandon email lists. Just my thoughts on mass emails…
Brian Ollman says hello, by the way. He’s still alive and kicking, just not active in pro ministry any more.
Welcome to the 21st Century
Andrew Jones, aka Tallskinnykiwi, advocates eloquently that all of us bloggers figure out the advanced techie options for syndication right now! Yeah, this means you, Dave Rattigan! 😉 Taking Andrew’s advice, I signed up on feedburner (free and easy) and
Can you say more about how we bloggers *use* RSS feeds? I’m not sure what I have to gain, for example, from FeedBurner when I already provide an RSS feed that people are reading.
Hi Sarah – i took a look at your blog – Typepad already sends out an RSS and an Atom feed from your site so you are taken care of. Although i would recommend a +My Yahoo badge for easy addition to the RSS feeds on peoples home page.
As for “using” RSS feeds – check out how Jordon Cooper does it.
here.
Technorati..!
I’ve been playing with the site a bit recently and here are some things that i have found really useful. I’m not a geek really – I do actually spend most of my day having conversations with people face-to-face; but
RSS: How people blog
I was reading this @ TSK night before last and it inspired me to act.