Seth Godin makes the point that RSS is a great update alert mechanism for web content even if your site isn’t a blog per se…So true! Think catalogues, events, links, and even document syndication (enclosures are not just for MP3s ya know!). The list goes on…
Seth mentions an RSS management product from Evolvepoint called FeedCraft. Looks good, but I wish he had mentioned FeedHoster in the same post.
Both systems offer the same basic functionality, but differ in a few ways…
FeedCraft hosts your feeds, which FeedHoster also does. But FeedHoster provides the additional option of exporting your feed using the built in FTP client. This means you can build your feed on FeedHoster (it’s all web based), and then export directly to your own server. Sweet.
FeedCraft provide fairly comprehensive feed stats. I think this is why they host the feed for you rather than allowing you to export the feed…doing that might disable the stats tracking. I might be wrong on this, but that seems to be the case. FeedHoster doesn’t provide stats, instead encouraging users to use FeedBurner (the king of feed stats).
FeedHoster allows you to build regular feeds (like Feedcraft), but also allows you to build serialized RSS feeds, like this example. Feedcraft doesn’t provide this option.
No question, that Feedcraft is a nice looking option, but FeedHoster has some coolio features to offer :)
I’ll be posting more thoughts on RSS soon. I’ve been working on a post about personal and disposable RSS feeds.
No, this isn’t going to become a video blog…just got one more I had to share. This is Tripod, an Australian music comedy trio, and this is funny as hell.
Wow, I have just finished my first week as Online Marketing Manager for New Zealands largest independant travel agency, House Of Travel. Maybe it was a week of concentrating hard all day trying to soak up a lot of information, or maybe I just ain’t used to working all day…whatevs, I slept in this morning.
The last 3.5 months have been something of a sabbatical for me, during which time I have had a chance to really think about where I want to go and what I want to achieve.
One thing that has been very clear all along is I want to stay in the web. I am more bullish than ever about online commerce, and while I am not a true technologist, I am definitely an evangelist for the ways tech (the web especially) can simplify process, amplify competitive advantage, and enhance the customer experience. That last bit sounds a bit hokey, but when you start thinking about how a brand grows out of the experience of customers you can understand where brand managment and marketing intersect with technology…and you’ll understand why I am so excited about working for HOT, they get it.
Having said all that Surfarama is not going to become a forum for talking about House Of Travel, mostly because the line between what is and isn’t appropriate is fine and I don’t want to approach it. But I will say that travel is a long tail business if ever there was one…on the supply side an almost unlimited number of possible destinations and experiences, while the demand side is characterized by an endless variety of personalities and expectations. The web totally plays a part in providing for the long tail. Yipee.
You can expect Surfarama to continue as an irregular dispatch of stuff that I find interesting, aswell as my experiements on the fringes of RSS as time allows. For example, right now I am hoping to find time to create serialized podcast feeds of Cory Doctorow’s short story recordings.
I would be paying very close attention if I were in the yellow pages business…you’re gonna have to do something pretty tasty to stay relevant in the face of this. In 2-3 years dead tree versions of your directory will start becoming rapidly irrelevant. It’s started already, but once the mobile internet picks up real speed, and once we’ve all got connectivity in our cars (with LCD screens, connectivity and GPS) this kind of map interface is going to be THE way we find stuff we used to lookup in the yellow pages.
No doubt the forward thinking players in the yellow pages business will be planning their own map type interfaces, but I can’t help but think we’re gonna see some ad spend convergence here…If I am a retail chain operator trying to drive sales online as well as people through my bricks and mortar stores Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) will be able to service my needs pretty seemlessly.
Actually with that thought in mind I wonder if we’ll ever see Google buying yellow pages companies for access to their customer lists. Clearly they’d have some overlap already, but it might be a good way to speed up revenue growth in both search and mapvertising, particularly when you consider that the yellow pages market is still currently WAY bigger than the entire online advertising market (as David points out).
