Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
I decided to try adding ads to my RSS feed a few months back to see how the process worked and if it is a viable revenue generator. The ads were inserted into my RSS feed by the FeedBurner Ad Network.
I have dropped the ads from the feed in the last few days as they were generating a small bit of negative feedback from readers and there was virtually no income from them (around $2 for the month of January).
Has anyone else using RSS advertising decided to roll back on it?
Endgadget are reporting that Microsoft has announced Windows Mobile Edition 6 - Microsoft’s operating system for mobile phones.
According to the article, the major new features of WME6 are
- HTML support in email
- Windows Live for Windows Mobile
- File transfer capability in Windows Live Messenger
- New versions of mobile Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with rich editing
- Remote wipe capability for stolen and lost devices
- Call history in contact cards
- Tight Vista integration
- “Calendar ribbon” for more easily viewing schedule by day or week
- New versions of .NET Compact Framework and SQL Server built-in
Some nice features in there alright but how about support for RSS? It would be great to be able to have an RSS reader built-in to the phone. This would make it trivial allow people to subscribe to podcasts, for example from their phones and do away with the need to be carrying a phone and an iPod.
There’s a demo of WME6 on YouTube.
In June 2005 Microsoft announced their support for RSS. At the time it seemed like a good thing that Microsoft were embracing this standard, however, it was Microsoft after all. I should have known there was a more sinister motive behind it.
Today, according to an article in News.com, Microsoft has filed two patent applications covering RSS. The patents were filed in June 2005 but only came to light today.
The first application is for “finding and consuming Web subscriptions in a Web browser” while the second, according to the article is:
titled “content syndication platform,” [and] appears to describe a system that can break down feeds into a format that can be accessed and managed by many different types of applications and users.
Dave Winer is unsurprisingly, unimpressed and says:
Presumably they’re eventually going to charge us to use it. This should be denounced by everyone who has contributed anything to the success of RSS.
Nick Bradbury, of NewsGator takes a more sanguine approach saying:
quite often companies file patents just to protect themselves from lawsuits. There are plenty of sleazebags who file patent applications on obvious ideas, and then wait for someone like Microsoft to infringe those patents. In other words, companies like Microsoft often file patents to prevent having to shell out millions of dollars to predatory lawyers who haven’t invented anything other than a legal pain in the ass.
So, what do you think, is Microsoft’s “evil” reputation is deserved after all? Or is this a sad reflection on the state of US patent law?
If we ignore the fact that the term Web 2.0 is controversial for all kinds of reasons and concentrate on the applications themselves, which Web 2.0 apps (using the broadest possible definition) do you use most?
I use:
What cool Web 2.0 apps am I not using that I should be using? What are your favourite Web 2.0 apps?
Jeremiah Owyang is on a trip to China at the moment. He put up a post on his blog the other day saying he couldn’t access Robert Scoble’s blog from inside China - it seems to be blocked by the Great Firewall of China for some reason. I don’t know if this applies to all WordPress.com accounts or just Robert’s.
In any case, it occurred to me this morning that if I Shared all of Robert’s posts from within my Google Reader account and sent Jeremiah the links to my Google Reader Shared items, he should be able to read Robert’s posts within China.
Of course if Google Reader had a way to allow you to select multiple posts to share (or even allowed you to share a full feed) then this would make it easier for me to keep Jeremiah up to date!
Until China starts blocking Google Reader!
Via Mick in a comment on this post comes news that Irish recruitment website RecruitIreland.com is now offering RSS feeds on search results.
RSS is ideal for recruitment sites, real estate sites, travel sites, etc. basically any site with updating content where people search for information!
On the RecruitIreland site, I like the fact that you can get RSS feeds for the advanced searches however one failing of the advanced search is that you can’t filter for jobs over a certain salary threshold (”I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning for less than…”).
With the recent launch of IE7, RSS is increasingly becoming mainstream. Soon having a site without an RSS feed will be the equivalent of having a toy without batteries - it might be nice to look at but it won’t do anything for you!
Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!
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