What is RSS?
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a means to easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, plus at times content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines plus notices for easy reading.
What problem does RSS solve?
Nearly all people are interested in countless websites whose content changes on an random schedule. Examples of such websites are news sites, community plus religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, plus weblogs. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious.
Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from various websites they are usually disorganized plus can get overwhelming, plus are often mistaken for spam.
RSS is a better means to be notified of new plus changed content. Notifications of changes to various websites are handled easily, plus the results are presented to you well organized plus distinct from email.
How does RSS work?
RSS works by having the website author sustain a list of notifications on their website in a standard way. This list of notifications is called an “RSS Feed”. People who are interested in finding out the latest headlines or changes can check this list. Special computer programs called “RSS aggregators” have been developed that automatically access the RSS feeds of websites you care about on your behalf plus organize the results for you. (RSS feeds plus aggregators are plus at times called “RSS Channels” plus “RSS Readers”.)
Producing an RSS feed is very simple plus hundreds of thousands of websites now provide this feature, including major news organizations like the New York Times, the BBC, plus Reuters, as well as countless weblogs.
What information does RSS provide?
RSS provides very fundamental information to do its notification. It is made up of a list of items presented in order from newest to oldest. each item usually consists of a simple title describing the item along with a more complete description plus a link to a web page with the actual information being described. At times this description is the full information you want to read (such as the content of a weblog post) plus at times it is just a summary.
RSS aggregator programs
Think of an RSS aggregator as just a web browser for RSS content. RSS aggregators automatically check a series of RSS feeds for new items on an ongoing basis, making it is possible to keep track of changes to various websites without needing to tediously read plus re-read each of the websites yourself. They detect the additions plus present them all together to you in a dense plus useful manner. If the title plus description of an item are of interest, the link can be used to quickly bring the related web page up for reading.
How do I find out if a website has an RSS feed?
It is getting more plus more common for websites to have RSS feeds. They usually indicate the existence of the feed on the home page or main news page with a link to “RSS”, or at times by displaying an orange button with the letters “XML” or “RSS”. RSS feeds are plus often found via a “Syndicate This” link. Text “RSS” links at times (there are lots of variations) point to a web page explaining the nature of the RSS feeds provided plus how to find them. The buttons are often linked directly to the RSS feed file itself.
Once you know the URL of an RSS feed, you can provide that address to an RSS aggregator program plus have the aggregator monitor the feed for you. Lots of RSS aggregators come preconfigured with a list to choose from of RSS feed URLs for popular news websites.
How is the RSS feed file produced?
Unless you are maintaining a website or want to create your own RSS feed for some other purpose, how the RSS feed is produced should not be of concern plus you may skip this section.
The special XML-format file that makes up an RSS feed is usually created in one of a variety of ways.
Nearly all large news websites plus nearly all weblogs are maintained using special “content management” programs. Authors add their stories plus postings to the website by interacting with those programs plus plus use the program’s “publish” facility to create the HTML files that make up the website. Those programs often plus can update the RSS feed XML file at the same time, adding an item referring to the new story or post, plus removing less recent items. Blog creation tools like Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, plus Radio automatically create feeds.
Websites that are produced in a more custom manner, such as with Macromedia Dreamweaver or a simple text editor, usually do not automatically create RSS feeds. Authors of such websites either sustain the XML files by hand, just as they do the website itself, or use a tool such as Software Garden, Inc.’s ListGarden program to sustain it. There are plus services that occasionally read requested websites themselves plus try to automatically determine changes (this is nearly all reliable for websites with a somewhat regular news-like format), or that let you create RSS feed XML files that are hosted by that service provider.
how can i make money with rss?
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SPIDERSS For Android: Browser, RSS Reader And Social Network Update Aggregator In One Tokyo-based j.
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sux0r 2.0 is a blogging package, an RSS aggregator, a bookmark repository, and a photo publishing platform with a focus on Naive Bayesian categorization and …
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33) Pop Unders. 34) Technorati and ping it when your blog content changes. 35) Use a ping service like pingomatic to ping RSS aggregators. 36) Submit your blog to all of the RSS directories. 37) Link to other blogs in your posts …
Million Dollar Area – http://www.milliondollararea.com/
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Online publishing is in many respects the new frontier for those who have a voice, a business, a desire to communicate or change things for the better. It potentially enables any individual connected to the net to be a two-way communication hub capable of sending out information and equipped with technologies to listen and respond. But to transform such revolutionary opportunity into a truly effective marketing vehicle, or into a sustainable online business resource, takes a lot more than what we are told on blogs or on the many sites promoting how easy and fast it is to become a successful online publisher.
Photo credit: Robin Good
In reality, transforming the online publishing opportunity into something that one can leverage to reach and realize his own dreams, it is much more complex and hard than we are told.
It takes lots of efforts, time, resources, expertise and skills which are not part, for the most, of our typical background and scholastic preparation. It requires the use of approaches and methods which sometimes counter what we have unconsciously learned through traditional media and that command lots of dedicated work to produce any significant results.
But even the most fundamental, basic concepts of effective communication, sometimes seem to escape even those that command so well technology and new trends. It may be because some of us really never got to stop and study the mechanisms behind it, or simply because what we have been often seeing reported as professional communication has been nothing but the wrong approach to getting a message across and starting a true conversation.
In these two short excerpts from my Dicole OZ show, recorded in Helsinki, this past December, you can grasp a little more of what I think is really essential to know to become a great and effective web publisher.
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Website usability testing identifies a precise methodology devoted to uncover specific bugs, idiosyncrasies and ambiguities in the way that website design impacts the effective use, legibility, navigation, and user experience of your website. In this MasterNewMedia guide you can find the best free website usability testing tools available out there.
Heat map of MasterNewMedia homepage created with Feng-GUI
Website usability testing is indeed a critical component of any effective online publishing strategy. When properly utilized, usability testing allows you to effectively scan and rapidly identify which are the critical issues to be addressed in your web publication that can improve legibility, the time visitors spend on your website or the ability to turn offers for products and services into actual conversions.
In fact, what’s the point of having valuable content under your hood if your readers cannot easily discover it, share it and put it to effective use?
To be of immediate “use“, let me share first with you a simple set of basic tasks you can follow to start testing and reviewing the usability of your own website:
- Identify a critical goal: Likely, you have multiple goals for your website. The first step is to focus on the most critical. Is it sales? Is it traffic? Is it help people find something?
- Use Personas: Create typical users profiles to best focus on potential needs and expectations of a fictional target group. Is your website addressed to experts in the filed or to a general audience? Do you want to attract loyal readers or occasional stumblers? Which age / sex / location are your users?
- Carry on critical tasks: After identifying your goals and creating typical users profiles (Personas), you want some friends, readers or volunteers, to carry on critical tasks on your website to identify areas for improvement and weaknesses. Is the sale process straightforward? Can people download your content easily? Are your blog posts easily shareable on social media?
- Collect the data: While your users go through a set of pre-determined tasks and perform specific actions on your website, you need to closely observe and report where they hesitate, step back, or remain confused by what they see on your site. Better yet, you can use a dedicated usability tool that collects absolute or relative data that can help you characterize the behavior of your testers.
- Review your analysis: Once you gather this data, you need to group it in clear-labeled groups (i.e. navigation, layout, functional flow, error handling, etc.), so that you can easily review and analyze all of this information and then find the ideal strategy to make your improvements.
Now that you know what are the key steps needed to start a website usability test, what you really need is knowing which tools or services are available out there that you can immediately put to use to support, speed up and professionally organize those very tasks.
But how can you identify and select which is the most appropriate website usability testing tool for your specific needs, competence level and budget?
To help you get started right away, this guide provides you with a set of individual reviews, a comparative table and a comprehensive mindmap to help you select your ideal free website usability testing tool.
Please note that these free usability testing tools have a limited range of features. For example, they do not allow you to record the screen of your testers or engage them in screen-sharing sessions unlike professional usability testing solutions like TechSmith Morae, which will be covered in a separate upcoming MasterNewMedia guide.
Now that I have warned you about the limitations of these free website usability testing tools, here below are the specific selection criteria that I have used to compare these different services:
- Testing approach: a) Test the usability of your website by inviting specific users to share their feedback, b) analyze analytic and statistical data.
- Analytics: Generate automatic analytical data from each website usability testing tool to evaluate the the quality of your website design and user interface.
- Visualization of user behavior: Visualize the behavior of your visitors by analyzing where they click or look (via mouse tracking) on your website and which path they follow to carry on specific tasks.
- Usability report: Generate a comprehensive report that contains all the analytical data gathered by the usability test.
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Does your online business use a disruptive innovation approach? In other words: have you ever considered getting a huge advantage over your competition by developing a business strategy that is a completely different way from what everyone else in your field does?
Photo credit: Kheng Guan Toh
Disruptive innovation is a term used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers. (Source: Wikipedia)
Disruptive innovation happens when a breakthrough development opens new and unexpected scenarios for future development and / or improves an existing product.
Scott Anthony, author of the book The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, points out that is not necessarily a new technology that drives disruptive innovation: “many times the technology is quite trivial. It is the business model, the way a company organizes and acts that drives disruption“.
To support this statement, Scott provides two examples. Walmart and the Nintendo Wii:
- When Walmart opened its first discount retailer in 1962, it was not doing something special by selling goods that were different than its competitors. What Walmart did instead, was to revolutionize its business policy by focusing on very low prices and on discount retailing.
- Instead of introducing games with better graphics, Nintendo has made it simpler and more accessible to play a videogame by introducing the Wiimote, an innovative game controller. Nintendo has consciously tried to target the non-gamers, and by doing so, it has greatly expanded the market for videogames and started to lead the future path of the gaming industry.
In both these examples, technology is either not relevant or very marginal to create disruption, whereas is the ability to solve real problems or to address new audiences the key to create effective disruptive innovation opportunities.
In fact, for Scott disruptive innovation generally occurs in those markets where some kind of constraints inhibit developments, and when specific needs of customers are not properly addressed. When such barriers to consumption are torn down, you are effectively creating space for disruption to take place.
If you want to know how you can facilitate, identify and enable disruptive innovation inside your organization, you will hear about some interesting and inspiring stories in this video interview with Scott Anthony himself.
Here is what he had to say (full video and transcription):
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Create RSS Feeds – Free! RSS News Feeds For Your Website. Generate RSS Feeds from your website
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Create RSS feeds. RSS news feeds are now being used as marketing tools.
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RSS Feeds are created in XML. Feeds can be created using tags that are enclosed.
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Franklin Spirko Media .
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