Last week I promised a spam-stopping trick, and here it is: RSS. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” but it also “Really Stops Spam,” and only about 25% of the world knows anything about it.
This technology isn’t about filtering spam out of your inbox — it’s about reducing the amount of stuff that even attempts to get into your inbox. If you learn to use RSS, you can actually unsubscribe from a whole bunch of stuff that you’re currently deleting, filing away, or just feeling guilty about not reading as it clogs your inbox — because RSS doesn’t involve email at all.
RSS documents (called “feeds”) are readable by web browsers, and by web-based services called “feed readers.” Several outstanding feed readers are freely available; I’ve heard great things about Google Reader, and I currently use Bloglines. You can set up a free account with these services in minutes. Here are a couple of video tutorials:
- Google Reader Tutorial (this video starts automatically!) by the fabulous Andy Wibbels, professional blogger and tech expert with a reassuringly human ability to explain things.
- RSS in Plain English is exactly what it sounds like.
- Oddly, I couldn’t find a current (newer than 2006) video tutorial for Bloglines, but here’s their FAQ file.
Once you have an account, you can use your reader to “subscribe” to a feed, without ever disclosing your email address at all. Then you use your reader to organize and read your feeds. You have complete control over how and when you see the feeds, instead of awaiting (or dreading) the delivery of email newsletters or announcements on someone else’s schedule.
Almost all blogs (including this very blog 
) and newsletters are available in RSS format. Just look for the universal “feed icon” (the orange square with stylized white radio waves, which I’ve reproduced in multiple colors above) and click on it to use your web-based reader to subscribe. Every time a new post or issue is added to a blog or newsletter, a new RSS entry is automatically created and made available in your feed reader.
Now you can save your email inbox for actual communication that you want to respond to, and keep your newsletter and blog subscriptions in your feed reader. RSS subscriptions are also available for lots of special functions, like weather updates, product (and recall) announcements, flight status, sports scores, and stock price tickers. Most readers offer handy tools for saving, filing, and emailing individual posts/items, and creating folders and labels for various categories of feeds. And it’s all free!
This week’s heart of the matter: Give RSS a try, and see how many of your current newsletters and email lists have an RSS feed. If your inbox is crowded, you should be able to immediately ease the pressure with RSS. Let me know how it goes!
Until next week!
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Posted by Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator
Scoble actually predicted a Google Reader social bookmarking engine in 2006.
You can now add friends to your friends list, share feed items, bookmark single blog posts from blogs that you read on the web and here’s the kicker, there is now a blog recommendation engine that recommends blogs you do not read by what your friends list is subscribed to in their Google Readers.
Then, everything you share and bookmark in Google Reader of course comes up on your Google shared items page linked to by your Google profile.
What really blew me away was the recommendation engine. If you add as many of your email list subscribers as you can to your Google Reader you can get a real good idea of what other blogs your subscribers are reading.
The links in your shared items are all HTML and fully followed so every time one of your RSS subscribers shares a blog post it is creating incoming links to your site.
Better yet, it uses the exact blog post title you wrote so now your links use your keyword phrases and bookmarkers can’t change your title tag.
After talking to my SEO top dog contacts, they were all floored and assured me this is the new SEO tactic that no one knows about.
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=136
It is kind of hard to add friends, the easiest way is to send a chat invite from Gmail and then email your contact you want to friend and have them email you back. It seems Google wants a two way conversation before they will allow you to become mutual friends.
If you would like to friend me, add chrislang at gmail.com to your Google Gmail chat and send me an email letting me know so I can return an email to you, thereby creating a two way connection in Google.
Google is quietly rolling this out behind the scenes but it is a full blown social bookmarking application and the blog recommendation engine is the new blog marketing strategy.
One thing I have not quite figured out is if using FeedBurner now hurts you since the links point at the FeedBurner redirect rather than your site like a WordPress feed does.