Search Engine Strategies Experts on Web Feeds, Blogs & Search
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Written By Reprise Media | March 1, 2005 | Share This
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If attendance was any indication, you’d think blogs and RSS were on their way out. No matter, the empty chairs made things roomier for those that were there, including bloggers who needed the extra elbow room to get fast and furious on their laptops.
The SES New York session Web Feeds, Blogs & Search was moderated […]
If attendance was any indication, you’d think blogs and RSS were on their way out. No matter, the empty chairs made things roomier for those that were there, including bloggers who needed the extra elbow room to get fast and furious on their laptops.
The SES New York session Web Feeds, Blogs & Search was moderated by Chris Sherman, Associate Editor at Search Engine Watch, with Dr. Amanda Watlington of SearchForProfit.com leading things off.
She started with some general stats, many of them from January’s Pew report, making the point that even though there are millions of bloggers, the majority of Internet users are still not sure what a blog is. This was driven home by the number of relatively tech savvy folks in attendance who, when asked by a show of hands, were unable to provide a definition for fairly basic blog terms such as trackbacking.
Watlington went on to discuss the old (creating content and waiting for it to get submitted) vs. new (creating content and having it grabbed by the user) information paradigm as well as the importance of blogs to marketing sites as the Scobel “You’re Fired” schtick saw the light of day once again. The rest was pretty basic, though we liked her four point plan for managing your RSS feed:
- Create
- Validate
- Disseminate
- Eliminate
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts was up next, giving an intro primer on the types of RSS aggregators. His motto for getting the most of RSS: Give it away. Also, make it easy to subscribe and provide robust options for personalization, including interest tickboxes and respect user privacy at all times.
Most interesting was Spencer’s ideas for information to make available via RSS feeds. This included store promotions and clearance specials, upcoming events, newest arrivals, post comments, posts by category, etc. He ended with some ways to keep the “search engine juice” flowing with things like RSS directory submissions, trackbacks, pings, etc.
Greg Jarboe, President of SEO-PR.com came out next with a case study of a small business that got their initial foray into the blogosphere right the first time, and a look at how they did it.
The VoIP Insights Blog of the BTI Communications Group took off for a number of reasons, among them a wisely chosen name, a smart linking strategy, quality outsourced content, and a symbiotic relationship between marketing and tech.
Jarboe likened the blog world to a conversation that was going to go on with or without your company. He cited disasters like the Kryptonite lock fiasco, whereby execs learned from bloggers about a critical flaw in their product (locks that don’t, umm…lock).
Nan Dawkins wrapped it up, providing some quick comments to the effect of ‘yea, what everyone else said’ as well as a mention of a site called “RSS 2 Anything” that supposedly allows you to transform anything into an RSS feed (does anyone have a link? we tried the one she gave - www.rss2anything.com - but it’s not working).
The session closed with a Q&A pitting these obviously pro-blog pundits against a few of the more cautious members of the audience. The relatively low start-up costs of corporate blogging were talked about as well as its ROI potential and the need for all companies to establish a corporate blogging policy. We’ll blog to that.
Topics: Advertising: Distribution, Blogging, RSS, Search: Innovations |
The improvement of Accoona since lanched in december is great,I can seach for web,business and news at the same time with only one click I have never seen that before ,and the result are very relevant total opposit to their early resuts in december.Also accoona news results for 2 or more key word search are much larger than the other search engine.
Thanks for the mention, but I have a different view of the attendance of two out of the three blog sessions at this week’s Search Engine Strategies conference. Both the session on Monday afternoon, "Blogs, Boards, and Posts: Caputring Consumer Buzz Online", and the one Tuesday morning, "Web Feeds, Blogs & Search", had several hundred attendees. So, interest in the topic was pretty high. (I didn’t get to the third session on Tuesday afternoon, "News & Webfeed Search", so I don’t know if attendance was similar or not.) Also, I don’t recall mentioning the Kryponite lock fiasco in my session on Tuesday morning. I remember it being talked about at the Monday afternoon session.
Hey Greg,I have the lock story in my notes from the 11:30 Tuesday session: Web Feeds, Blogs & Search. I used the Conference Handbook to make notes right next to the slides, so I’m pretty sure it was in this session. Maybe it was another speaker and I incorrectly attributed it to you?The attendance is more subjective. I didn’t make it to the Monday afternoon blog session, but the Tuesday morning one seemed a little thin compared to other sessions. But that could also be the impact of physical space - even a substantial number of people would look small in such a big room.
If you’re looking for stats on the size of the blogosphere, try my blog, http://Blogcount.com. My sense is there are about 50 million active blogs, more than 10 million in South Korea alone. Nice writeup, almost like being there. Thanks. - phil
XBRL. eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Will this replace RSS, XML and Blogs?XBRL tags enables automated processing of business information by computer software, cutting out laborious and costly processes of manual re-entry and comparison. Computers can treat XBRL data "intelligently": they can recognise the information in a XBRL document, select it, analyse it, store it, exchange it with other computers and present it automatically in a variety of ways for users. XBRL greatly increases the speed of handling of financial data, reduces the chance of error and permits automatic checking of information.
I agree with Greg about attendance. Maybe it looks different when you are in the front of the room. In contrast with some of the sessions that I attended this one was very well attended.
Sorry about the rss2anything page…not sure what happened to it. It was there last week. Try this instead:feedfire.comThe quality isn’t great, but it will give you a sense of what converting html to a feed looks like. Also, Robin Good’s newsmaster site has a good list of tools for converting email, pdfs, etc. to RSS.Finally, my main comment at the session was regarding the use of RSS as a marketing tool. I had hoped to stimulate some conversation about responsible use. One of the reasons RSS looks so good right now is that it doesn’t come with the baggage that goes with email. Would love to keep it that way. Any thoughts out there about this?