ContentRobot

NewsGator is another popular and free news reader (although you can sign up for more premium services).

Sign up

1. Access NewsGator here.
2. Click on the “Sign Up” button on the home page.
   
3. Enter a username, password, first name, last name, and email address. Also, click the checkbox to agree to the Terms of Service and then press the Next Button.
   
4. Choose your subscription level (Standard / Free is already selected) and scroll down and click on the Next button.
   
5. Select your starter packs or individual feeds (what feeds you’d like to see) and then click on the Finish button.
   
6. You will be taken to your “Web Reader” page and your subscriptions will be listed in the left column.
   
7. Click on a feed name to view posts.
   

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Register with My Yahoo!

1. Go to My Yahoo!.
2. Click the “Sign Up” link in the top left corner. (If you already have a Yahoo account click “Sign In” and skip to the “Adding a Feed to My Yahoo! using the + My Yahoo! Button” section below.)
   
3. At the next screen, click on your interests, then click Save. (You’ll see the page being “built” in the on-screen preview.)
   
4. On the next page, click on “Sign Up” to save your interests.
   
5. On the registration page fill in the form:
   
• Your first name
• Your last name name
• Choose your Yahoo! ID (you’ll most likely have to check its availability)
• A password
• Whether you want a Yahoo! mailbox (a good idea, you can get your mail from anywhere)
• Password retrieval hints (this area has you put in your birthday, zip code, and optional alternative email address)
• Customize by industry, title, and specialization
• Verify your registration by typing in the code they display
• Agree to the Terms of Service (you should at least skim it)
• Click on Submit this Form Securely
6. This page indicates that your registration has been completed. A copy of your registration gets sent to the email address you have provided.
   
7. Click on Continue to My Yahoo! to see the page you created. (Remember, in the future, you will have to use your created Yahoo! ID and password to access your information at My Yahoo!)

Adding a Feed to My Yahoo! using the + My Yahoo! Button

1. Make sure you are signed in to your My Yahoo! page.
2. In a new browser window, go to ContentRobot.
3. Click on the + My Yahoo! Button
   
4. You’ll get a preview of the feed.
5. Click the Add to My Yahoo! button.
   
6. You will get the message “This source has been added to My Yahoo!”, then click on the “Go to My Yahoo!” link.
   
7. The new feed will now appear at the bottom of your My Yahoo! page
   

Adding a Feed to My Yahoo! using the Add Content Feature

1. Make sure you are signed in to your My Yahoo! page.
2. Click on the + Add Content button
   
3. Next to the Find button, click on the Add RSS by URL link
   
4. Type the URL (web site name, www.tunevroom.com, for example)
5. Click on Add.
   
6. You’ll get a preview of the feed.
7. On the Yahoo! screen, click the Add to My Yahoo! button.
   
8. You will get the message “This source has been added to My Yahoo!”, then click on the “Go to My Yahoo!” link.
   
9. The new feed will now appear at the bottom of your My Yahoo! page
   

Signing up with Bloglines is free and easy - only an email address and password are required.

How to Register with Bloglines

1. Go to www.bloglines.com.
2. Click on the Sign up now link.
   
3. Enter your email address and a password. (Make sure that you type in a correct email address as they will send you an email soon to verify your account). Read the Entire Post >

Subscribing to News Feeds

Have you ever seen icons but didn’t know what they were all about?

These point to XML (Extensible Markup Language), or special Web coding for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) that describes a new type of Web information called a “news feed.”

Essentially, these feeds contain a summary and links of any new content on a Web site or blog (or anything else a creator desires to share). A company may publish an RSS feed that contains news of its latest products, for example. When a website has an RSS feed, it is said to be “syndicated.”

How do I Receive RSS Feeds?
The first step is to install an RSS reader (also known as an “RSS aggregator” or “newsreader”). RSS readers are lightweight software programs that allow users to scan dozens, even hundreds, of fresh headlines a day. They are, for the most part, free for the taking.

RSS readers allow you to scroll through cleanly organized headlines and story summaries (an executive summary of the net!) that has little to no graphics and advertising. When you find a story you like, you click it to view it. Not interested? Just keep scrolling without clicking and waiting for a site page to load.

This software may be a standalone program such as Bloglines or integrated into a program that you already use, such as Microsoft Outlook. My Yahoo! even has an RSS module.

The Advantages of Subscribing to Feeds

• Speed Reading the Internet – You’ll have hundreds of resources at your fingertips. Like many people, you are using the Web as your main source of news and research. If you’re a veteran, you may have hundreds (or maybe more) bookmarks to help you keep track of it all. RSS readers can help you save time because you no longer have to hop from site to site to get your news and information.
• Automatic Updates – An RSS reader automatically updates itself with the latest items from the sites you tell it to watch, so it’s always fresh. You no longer have to access your favorite sites and constantly click “refresh,” to know what’s been newly published.
• Minimizes Spam – RSS gives you control over receiving information you want without revealing information about yourself. Unlike subscribing to an e-mail newsletter, you never have to give out your e-mail address with an RSS feed. That avoids the possibility of receiving spam or unwanted junk e-mail from the Web site.
• Customized to Your Preferences – RSS allows you to receive news and information on the subjects you want. The result is a targeted or personalized news experience, giving you greater ability to tailor your consumption of niche and micro-niche topics. A sports junkie could subscribe to a feed for the Tour de France or a favorite baseball team. A job-hunter could subscribe to a feed for openings in digital media. A medical editor or relative of someone with MS could receive RSS updates published to a health database.
• Instant Alerts – RSS can serve as an alert service. Instead of using e-mail, you might want to customize your news reader to deliver news on an important subject every 15 minutes.
• Read Feeds Anywhere – Because RSS feeds contain just links, headlines, or brief synopsis of new information, it means the small amount of Web data can be sent to any XML-compatible device - a cell phone, pager, or handheld computer - without a lengthy download process.

What’s Next?
In the next series of posts will tell how to download some of the popular ones and how to find feeds that may interest you (and how to subscribe to ContentRobot in each). By the end of the week, you’ll be an RSS pro.

So, what does it mean for marketing in a Web 2.0 world?

Market Drivers of Web 2.0
More people are getting online for a wide variety of tasks, including shopping-related activites. Broadband access has become mainstream and ubiquitous, and people are using the Internet more and more for even small tasks (even on different devices).

Trends
The trends show that customers will subscribe to RSS feeds and have RSS preferences, bypassing spam-filled email boxes. This shows that “word-of-mouth” or participatory marketing will be important when planning your campaigns. Blogs, rather than, web sites will optimized for search engine traffic.

Customers will now get treated like adults who have legitimate views and participate in conversations. Therefore, companies now must unobtrusively and gently shape conversations, where collaboration and organic discussions emerge.

Marketing Impact
Marketers must enter the conversations and communities via blogs and wikis by providing transparency, personalized, appropriate messages wherever and whenever. Ultimately, they are responsible for creating a satisfying online experience.

Marketing Toolkits
Companies should use blogs, podcasts, and RSS to deliver interactivity and extend or complement existing marketing activities and react in real-time.

Web 2.0 Lessons

• Leverage customer-self service to reach out to the entire web.
• Users add value, and can be treated as co-developers of a brand.
• Consider your brand in “perpetual beta” and engage your users as real-time testers.
• Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection.
• Cooperate but don’t control the emerging conversation.

One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages, personal diaries, and personal opinion, have been around since the early days of the web, so what is the fuss all about?

RSS Extends Web Page Viewing Away from the Browsers
It used to be that web browsers were the only way for people to view web pages. Now RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology extends that capability. RSS aggregators can be web-based (like Bloglines), desktop clients, and even portable devices allow you to subscribe to constantly updated content.

RSS is now being used to push not just notices of new blog entries, but also all kinds of data updates, including stock quotes, weather data, and photo availability.

Permalinks Point the Way Toward Discussion
But RSS is only part of what makes a weblog different from an ordinary web page. The permalink (or the ability to click through to the entire post’s page) effectively turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities.

For the first time it became relatively easy to point directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussions, chats, and friendships emerged or became more entrenched. Therefore, the permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs.

The “blogosphere” then can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others’ sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments.

Web 2.0 Harnesses Collective Intelligence
An essential part of Web 2.0 is turning the web into a kind of global brain. The blogosphere becomes the equivalent of constant mental chatter or voice we hear in all of our heads.

The blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, and bloggers (as the most prolific and timely linkers) have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results.

Considering what Wikipedia does, blogging then harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter or what James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” or Dan Gillmor calls “we, the media.”

What it Means for Your Blog Efforts
Your blogs, which will evolve into a multi-authored, broad channel collaboration site, where it becomes your focus group and spokespeople for your brands. Because they are leveraged, not a regurgitation of the web site content, you’ll get input, reviews, shared pictures, etc. as you control and manage the conversation.

Adapted from Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0

So what tools and technologies make Web 2.0 possible? With a little bit of help from the Wikipedia, here are the terms and their definitions.

Social software
Social software enables people to collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. It can encompass older media such as mailing lists and Usenet, but more recently it suggests genres such as blogs and wikis.

Social software can also be referred to the use of computer-mediated communication to create communities. People, then, will form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes.

Blogs
A blog (a shortened form of weblog or web log) is a website in which content is posted regularly and displayed in reverse chronological order. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging.” Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries.” A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger.”

A blog has certain attributes that distinguish it from a standard web page. It allows new pages to be easily created simply entering data into form and then submitted. Defined emplates allow you to add the article to the home page, create the new full article page, and archive via date or categories. It also allows the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permission and access are easily managed.

Wikis
A wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add and edit content and is especially suited for collaborative writing. A wiki system provides various tools that allow the user community to easily monitor the constantly changing state of the wiki and discuss the issues that emerge in trying to achieve a general consensus about wiki content. Wiki content can also be misleading as users may add incorrect information to the Wiki page.

A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Most wikis are open to the general public without the need to register any user account.

Podcasts
Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the internet using either RSS or Atom syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers. A podcast is a web feed of audio or video files placed on the Internet for anyone to download or subscribe to, and also the content of that feed.

Podcasting’s essence is about creating content (audio or video) for an audience that wants to listen when they want, where they want, and how they want.

RSS feeds
Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.

In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website’s frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator. Web feeds are widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries’ headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files.

Simpler web design
Design becomes focused on developing a community rather than selling to an individual. Whereas alot of web sites are rich with Flash-based presentations and other “bells and whistles,” the design in the Web 2.0 world gets simplified. Think of how sparse the Google home page is and how well it does with community-building with its offerings.

Blog templates, which are customized with CSS, are designed to showcase the content more than other elements on the page. This simplicity allows for the colloboration of many authors who don’t need to know much more beyond the basics of HTML to publish content.

Folksonomy
Folksonomy, which combines “folk” and “taxonomy,” refers to the collaborative (but unsophisticated way) that information is being categorized on the web. Instead of using a centralized form of classification, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (called tags) to pieces of information or data, a process known as tagging.

Examples of web services that use tagging include those who allow users to publish and share photographs, personal libraries, bookmarks, social software generally, and most blog software, which permits authors to assign tags to each entry.

Ajax
Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability.

What’s Next?
Now that the techy portion of Web 2.0 has been defined and examples given, we’ll explain how blogs fit in and how marketing teams must repond to this new environment

Web 1.0, built in the 1990s, is characterized as static web pages that were built and marketed by web professionals. Sites were found by typing in a domain name and hoping that a particular company had a site (hence the rise of domains such as pets.com).

Web 1.5, created around 2000, brought dynamic sites and ecommerce into the fold. Marketing campaigns are pushed via email and banner advertising.

Web 2.0, building in 2006, offers a place where customers are treated like adults and are valued for their opinions and views and are talked to in a human voice.

To further define the differences, the tables below summarizes the techniques and technologies that surround the Web 2.0 concept.

Web Marketing Techniques

Companies

Last Thursday, I listened to an interesting American Marketing Association (AMA) web seminar, Invisible Marketing: 3 Things Every Organization Needs to Know in the Era of Blogs, Podcasts and RSS Feeds. This has got me thinking about the concept of Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0? I’ll summarize what how the Wikipedia defines it:

Web 2.0 … has come to refer to what some people describe as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web.

Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997).

They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis.

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RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) feeds, provides the underlying power of blogs - and provides a wealth of marketing benefits.

Wikipedia defines RSS as:

A family of XML dialects for Web syndication used by (among other things) news websites and weblogs. The abbreviation is used to refer to the following standards:

• Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
• RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

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