RSS is totally hot. We have seen it everywhere, from John-Doe blogsites to major news websites. If you havent heard of RSS before, thats okay, because I hadnt either until a couple of months ago!
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or whatever you want it to stand for. I have seen it also stand for RDF Site Summary, but it really doesnt matter. Whats important is what it does.
Heres how RSS works:
Every site that has constantly changing content has one big problem: How do you notify your visitors when youve posted new content without them having to scour your entire site every 30 mins? You could send them an email, but that has several drawbacks.
First, you might not get your messages through the spam filters. Filters are snatching more and more messages, and just to keep up anymore you have to run all your content through rating systems just to find the likelyhood of it getting blocked. What a pain in the neck!
Second, people are so hesitant to give out their closely guarded email address. I know I guard my email address with my life. How can your visitors trust you if they just clicked to your site? You could be an underground spam operation for all they care.
This is where RSS is awesome!
Instead of sending an email, you can have your website generate whats called an RSS Feed. An RSS Feed is nothing more than a webpage with a bunch of summaries of the new content on it. Next time you see that little orange icon with XML or RSS, click on it and youll see what I mean. The summaries are formatted in such a way that an RSS Reader can sort them out and display them neatly.
There are tons of free RSS Readers now, so if you dont have one, do a simple Google search for RSS Reader and you should have no trouble finding one.
All the visitor has to do is copy the little orange RSS icon link and paste it into their RSS Reader program. The RSS program will periodically download the RSS webpage and will display the new headlines much like your email program will display your subject lines. If you like one of the headlines, you can click on it and it will display a short description and a link to the entire article. If you want to read more, click the link and it will display the actual full article on the website.
Heres why this is killer:
You can now be notified of the new content or headlines posted to all your favorite websites without having to do very much work! Imagine putting twenty RSS Feeds into your reader and having it download all the content in a matter of seconds instead of having to surf to each site individually!
If you ask me, RSS is here to stay. All the major sites support it like CNN, ESPN, Yahoo and Google, so that surely is a good sign! So go on and fire up Google and get yourself an RSS Reader. You will be glad you did...I sure was!
Feel free to reprint this article so long as you include the resource box listed with the article.
Kent Thompson is the creator of FeedMagic, a full-featured sequential autoresponder program that allows your subscribers to choose between Email or a personalized RSS Feed for delivery. To find out how you can use the power of RSS for your website, visit: http://FeedMagic.com
Internet Distribution: The Future of Entertainment.M6.netA friend and I were having a discussion recently. I asked him what he thought the next method of distribution for films and music would be. My thoughts were that we would have to come up with some new method that was convenient, sturdy and didnt involve compression (as CDs and DVDs do, thereby limiting the picture and sound quality, although not very much). He simply said that it wasnt going to happen; in the future its all going to be distributed on the Internet.
Ive heard this argument before. My grade ten IT teacher assured us that within five years (and this was four years ago) we would no longer be purchasing CDs. With the advent of broadband we were going to see purchases of music and movies online, streamed to the computer or another device. Ive always thought this was relatively unlikely. I may be in the minority, but I really like the CD and DVD cases. Theres something a bit more tangible to them, more of a feeling of value for money. Plus they look kind of good lined up on a shelf like some new-age library.
Having thought about it for a while now I have no doubt that the Internet is set to become a major distributor of media. When you think about it, it makes sense. Low to no production and distribution costs; you just provide a download location when people send you money. Cutting out the middle man has always been an effective way to save money, and in this case youre cutting out the shop owners, couriers and manufacturers. This should lead to substantial drops in prices (and loss of jobs... but... I have no defence for that. Youre just going to have to find yourselves a new career. Sorry. On the positive side your entertainment costs will go down, so you wont need the job quite as much...).
Purchasing movies or CDs can be quite expensive. When youre a bit unsure about whether or not you really want a particular title, the full price is often more than youre willing to pay. This leads to trawling the second hand shops looking for a cheaper copy or simply pirating the product. Digital distribution opens up whole new areas for the marketers. Different quality streams could be provided at increasing prices. If youre just interested to see what a films like then pay a little and get a low quality version. If the distributor were to offer an upgrade option that takes into account the amount of money already spent on a film, it could become a very attractive offer. This could also reduce the amount of piracy around. Finding and downloading movies is time consuming and irritating. It often takes around twenty hours to download a film, due to varying connection speeds and quality. If the movies were easy to access, cheap to purchase and the servers fast enough for the user to get the movie in around the time it would have taken to go and hire a film, then many of the reasons for pirating would be lost. In terms of hiring films, providing temporary access to online streams of movies for very low cost would work nicely.
Global distribution becomes a lot easier this way. As a big fan of foreign films, I often have to hope that the movies I want to see pop up on EBay, or wait for one of my infrequent trips to a larger city than I live in to visit their markets and/or Chinatown in order to purchase movies. Id love the option of buying the movies with greater ease online.
There are already a few sites out there offering the purchase of movie downloads, although Im not sure how the legality and licensing of these ventures works. The content available from the sites is often quite limited (and were talking really quite limited here, the most recent flick I found on one site was from 1980), but the right idea is there. Music is also being sold online through such places as the Apple Music Store and the MSN Music Store. These offer songs for download at about $0.99 a song, which is cheap, easy, quick, legal and more likely to get your money to the artists as opposed to the big corporations manufacturing CDs.
So, Ive come around to the idea of online distribution and its beneficial application to movies, music, software and even books. I still like my colourful boxes and cases but there are some movies that I own simply because I wanted to see them. The local video rental shop didnt have a copy, so resorting to buying them is an expensive way to see what a film is like. I guess my hopes for a completely uncompressed format are all but lost (not that it really matters any more with the ever increasing quality of technology). If the distributors will just get onto this idea as soon as possible they can solve many of their problems and ours within a very short period of time.
Daniel Punch
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