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July 25th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

Many people think RSS and email are alike - or at least direct competitors. However, there are fundamental differences that can make the two channels allies, and not enemies.

The Technology Marketing blog does a great job of explaining the differences. Specifically the first one is the most important (In my opinion):

RSS is a ‘pull’ technology, not a ‘push’. The delivery methodology is at the convenience of the customer and not the marketer. As such, time sensitive or must-see content may be better off being delivered via email than RSS. It’s easy to measure subscribes and unsubscribes via email, but it’s not as easy with RSS unless you have 1 to 1 feeds.

People read your email feed whenever and where ever they want, whereas email you are shoving it right in the inbox. Both work, both have their places, but they aren’t the same.

Keep reading…

What’s this RSS stuff all about?

October 19th, 2006 by Kelly Rusk

So in September’s Expresso e-bulletin, we focussed on RSS & email. It included a quick survey that asked our subscribers about RSS. It wasn’t too surprising that 54% of our readers didn’t even know what RSS is since it is still in its early adoption phase. I’ll be honest, before starting this blog I didn’t know a whole lot about it either, and although I do tend to be on the cutting edge of technology I admit that new things still scare me.

I’ve also noticed through the magic of analytics, that many of you, our blog readers, don’t use RSS, so I want to take a minute for a quick explanation and encourage those who don’t know to at least learn just a little about it.

RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary (usually reserved for the techies) or Really Simple Syndication (for the rest of us) and it’s a powerful tool that very basically alerts people (through a specialized reader or even email) when new content is published. Content can be anything really, but it’s commonly used for news, blogs and podcasts.

You use RSS by downloading or signing up for a reader (I use newsgator) and then when you see this symbol on a site or blog:

you can click on it and paste the URL into your reader to subscribe.(or commonly you’ll be directed to a page where you can select your reader and it’s added automatically) then all you have to do is check your reader whenever you feel like it.

But if that sounds complicated or labour intensive, you can always subscribe by email (being the email junkies we are, we’ve included a signup box over to the right) and you’ll get an email up to once a day with all the new content.

I hope I’ve said enough to pique your interest to find out more. At the very least I hope I didn’t make it sound to confusing!

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