Today RSS Goes Mainstream
With the global launch of Windows Vista today, RSS is going to get a lot more mainstream. Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 and MS Office 2007 all have RSS features incorporated into them. Outlook 2007 users will be able to subscribe to and consume RSS content as easily as they do with their email.
I’ve not personally tried Windows Vista, but from everything I read it’s going to be a lot easier now to for Vista users to detect, subscribe to and consume RSS content–all without needing to even know what RSS is. This is a good thing for RSS content creators and publishers. The more RSS consumption becomes as easy as listening to the radio or using email, the higher up the consumer adoption curve we’ll go.
If you don’t have RSS content available on your site, now is good time to do integrate it into you web and marketing strategies. More and more consumers are going to demand the ability to “subscribe to” your content, otherwise they will go elsewhere. The days of the traditional browser bookmark are disappearing. In order to engage your target marketing and keep bringing them back, you need to provide content that they can receive from you in an efficient and non-obtrusive manner–enter RSS.
Take a look at what content you already have on your site (audio, white papers, articles, news updates, etc.) that you could syndicate through a feed. A great way to add a feed to your site is with a blog engine such as the free Wordpress platform that I use on this site. Blogs are becoming an integral part of business/corporate web sites (if not the whole site itself).
If you’ve been contemplating using RSS to interact with your consumers and need help, please contact me. A time is fast coming where a lack of RSS syndicated content on your site will mean losing half or more of your web content consumers and hence customers.
January 30th, 2007 18:34
[…] As Microsoft’s Vista launches globally today, RSS syndication should get a nice boost in terms of mainstream adoption. Jason Van Orden points out that Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 and MS Office 2007 users will now be able to subscribe to RSS content (like blogs and podcasts) as easily as they do email. Obviously, we all hope that he’s right! […]