Forum Moderators: open
Do you know of examples where RSS technology was used 1) to its greatest benefit, and 2) to its worst detriment?
Are there 'stupid uses', wasteful efforts?
Are there good or even creatively brilliant implementations? Cunning implementations?
What distinguishes one from the other?
When should one use it and when should one smack one's self on the head for using it?
Have you ever seen it used in a way that hurt a website? Likewise, have you seen it used in a way that made a significant improvement?
Over the next couple of days I will think about it and answer at least some of the questions from my opinion.
Good to hear from you E.T.
ET phone home!
I would like to remind members to please not drop urls or companies in this thread but just describe the services.
One of the cooler RSS things I have seen is the whole PodCasting trend. I am still slighly confused how this works, but it is like a TV for internet radio broadcasts, allowing you to save them to your harddrive for later use.
Some other cool things would be daily hints, coupons or recipes. Good for the user as well as the website.
I would love to hear some bad examples...
I was one of the first 300 people to put an RDF feed on my site back when the old Netscape portal introduced the format. Looking back at some of my old feeds I can say that the old format, while useful in its time, was so limited in the amount of information you could include that it pales in comparison to the XML/Atom feeds we can pump out today. People that emulate this old format which consists of little more than a title, link and 15 word blurb, I feel are poorly implementing this technology.
People that emulate this old format which consists of little more than a title, link and 15 word blurb, I feel are poorly implementing this technology
The best examples of the current technology I find come from valid feeds that display the entire post/article so that I don't need to visit the site. I'd rather read the whole thing in my aggregator. A setup of MovableType 3.121 has new default templates for RSS and Atom feeds which give you the full feed (and images).
I don't quite see the point of that. Granted, blog posts tend to be a little shorter than normal articles. But I thought the point was to give a taster, and if you have the whole post you end up scrolling through a ton of text that may not be what you wanted to read today. If all your feeds are like that, it's a lot of scrolling.
My own view on the worst thing you can do is simply to have a broken feed. If it doesn't do its job, what's the point?
I don't quite see the point of that.I currently track a few thousand feeds. I hardly ever visit the actual page of any except a few of them. One of the main reasons I prefer the entire content is that in my aggregator I can setup watches for certain keywords. If there's only a short blurb provided then unless those keywords are in the title or the blurb I'm not going to find it. I then probably won't open that post, and I certainly won't visit the webpage. I find myself unsubscribing to a lot of feeds now if they don't provide full contents in their feeds.
I hardly ever visit the actual page of any except a few of them.... I find myself unsubscribing to a lot of feeds now if they don't provide full contents in their feeds.
Now, full RSS content feed for my paid subscriber base - oh yes. And will be something I introduce in 2005.
Also will write our own, branded RSS reader that has features unique to our sites/content whilst also allowing any other, competitor, RSS feed to be read. Indeed, we will bundle the reader with a list of other feeds.
It can display your feed (which cannot be deleted)and other offers you may have and also people can add their own feeds.
It will show your website address at the top of the reader and display all formats of feeds including atom.
I know this looks like my frst post here but i have been here for a while now just didnt post, used to have the user name uksitesubmit :)
[webmasterworld.com...] one of my first posts 4 years ago, those where the days!
Podcasting is huge. When we first started it, Google would return, "Did you mean Broadcasting?
It was that way until about 2 weeks ago. Now there are 752,000 results.
There was a stern warning I overheard from a large player in the traditional radio market and they are scared to death of this.
Good.
:>)
