CT Biz Blogs

Audible.com is a company that has online audio versions of books that can be downloaded to an MP3 player. I’ve been a subscriber to Audible.com since early 2001 (5 year anniversary in a week). At the time I joined, I was commuting an hour each way, and listening to books really made the time go by (and made me a little more knowledgeable, I hope).

Last December I got a letter and a free set of earbuds from Audible. The letter was from the president, Don Katz, telling me that, while they appreciated my business and my loyalty, the fact was that Audible was losing money on all its early-adopter listeners. I get two books a month for a very low price. He said that Audible would continue to honor the legacy account, but asked me to upgrade to a new account which would be only one book plus an audio magazine subscription.

My thought at the time was “Yeah, right. How can you lose money when there’s no inventory but some bits and bytes, and bandwidth for downloads?”

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I’m finished with RSS (for now). Here are the posts I’ve written over the last week:

• RSS and you
• How to find and use an RSS reader
• Ways to find RSS feeds, part 1
• Ways to find RSS feeds, part 2: search engines
• Ways to find RSS feeds, part 3
• Links: Articles on RSS to read

That RSS series of posts was going to be an off-the-cuff few words, instigated by Steve Rubel’s post about how even the Kremlin now has RSS feeds. Once started, however, I found I couldn’t stop typing. Frankly, it startled me a little when I got some attention from the Greater Blogosphere.

Now that I’ve poured all this information out of my brain, my next plan is to put this into a more organized form, probably as a PDF for people to download. So I’d appreciate any feedback — what didn’t make sense, what you’d like to see clarified or expanded upon, what was omitted.

Again, it’s not going to be the be-all, one-stop-shopping place for all things RSS. That’s a target that’s that’s moving too fast. But I’m hoping that if I start with more basic information in the intro, it’ll prompt more people to check out RSS and recognize it for the great tool that it is.

And I also want to thank all the folks who found these posts (mostly through Micro Persuasion) and linked back to them. Some I found through the trackbacks, some by following links, some by my referrer stats, and some by — wait for it — RSS. Yes, I have an RSS feed from Technorati for mentions of CT Biz Blogs. That’s the first thing I did when I found out about Technorati. If you have a blog, you need to do that, too.

So thanks to:

• Micro Persuasion
• LexBlog
• Blog Smart Resources Blog
• The Language Artist
• The Agonist
• My Own Public World (who’s using the Sage RSS reader based on reading my post)

Here’s the third and final part of my post about ways to find RSS feeds. (Part 1: Blogs; Part 2: Search Engines.)

Newspapers and other Online news services:

Many online newspapers, such as the New York Times or the Hartford Courant, have RSS subscriptions to different topics. Typically these won’t have the entire article in the feed, but instead will deliver to you the headlines, sometimes with an short excerpt. This is usually enough to determine if that article is something you want to read. If it is, click on the link in the feed to go right to that article. Piece of cake!

Some magazines, such as Business Week, are also putting articles online, with feeds.

Aside from getting feeds from newspapers and magazines, you can search across new sources with services such as Topix.net. I use it to send me mentions of my home town and companies I’m interested in.

For example, you can go to Topix.net, and type in the name of a company, such as General Motors. You’d get a page that looks something like this:
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Ok, finding blogs to read, and then adding them to your RSS reader is all well and good, but the next three reasons for using RSS will really make you a lean, mean, feed reading machine! You, the small business owner, can not afford not to keep up with industry news, trends, and the doings of competitors. And while you’re at it, you can streamline your life by using RSS to keep tabs on local and national news, sports, info about companies whose stock you own – the list gets longer every day.

All because of those little orange buttons and the magic of RSS.

I want to reiterate that this post is by no means a comprehensive look at all things RSS. I’m sharing the things I’ve used RSS for, in the hopes that it will encourage you to start using this tool.

Here are the main ways to keep on top of topics of interest via your RSS reader, besides reading other blogs:

• Search engines
• Newspapers and other online news services
• Other people’s bookmarks and tags

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I’m planning on having the latest installment up by the end of the day (5:30 PM or so, EST).

In the meantime, here are some additional articles on RSS that I should have mentioned in previous posts:

• 23 real simple steps to making your Internet life much better
• RSS: The Web at Your Fingertips
• Ten RSS Hacks
• Save time with syndication
• Using RSS 101 - Screencast

I recommend them — I learned from all of them.

Ok, so far I’ve talked about what RSS is, and how to find a way to read RSS feeds. Today is the part where you put it all together, and find RSS feeds that will help you:

• Keep up with blogs you should be reading
• Track marketing intel on competitors
• Get news on topics you care about

What a deal! With a little upfront work, you won’t have to go searching for what you need – it will come to you.

There’s a lot of info here, so I’m going to cut this into two. And, since I haven’t written bullet points #2 and 3 yet, that post will be available Monday.

Keep up with blogs

If you want to blog, you have to read other blogs. You need to do this for several reasons.

1. Stay current with other blogs which are about your industry or market.
2. Learn about blogging from blogs, such as this one, which address the subject.
3. Learn about business subjects you’re interested in, such as marketing, PR, accounting, and so on.

There are two main ways to find blogs: search, and other blogs.
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Ok, now that you’ve realized that RSS is something you need to know about, it’s time to pick an RSS reader (also called RSS aggregator, or feed reader).

There are pros and cons for every feed reader, so I’ll just give you my opinion about feed readers I’ve tried and point you to some readers to try out.

Web-based

My main issue is that I can be working on different computers throughout the day. I like to be able to read my feeds from any of those. That’s why I use Bloglines, which is a web-based reader.

I also like the fact that I don’t have to hunt through a blog site for the actual link to the RSS, which is sometimes hard to find. I only need to enter the URL of the site and voila! Bloglines also has a button you can add to your browser. When you find a blog you want to subscribe to, all you need to do is click on the button to add it.
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Ok, based on this blog post by Steve Rubel, about the Kremlin’s RSS feeds, I’m here to say that no one can ignore RSS (Really Simple Syndication, also called “feeds”) anymore.

I’ll admit, the name is a TLA (three-letter acronym), which is initially confusing. I’ll admit that even knowing the name doesn’t tell you what it’s good for. But once you try it, once you get an idea of what you can do with it, you’ll never look at the internet in the same way again.

That’s a good thing.

It’s time to put the internet to work for you, through RSS.

There are a lot of places you can read about RSS, including this blog. I’ve got a short list at the end of this post.

Here’s RSS in one sentence – “RSS organizes web-based information into a format which allows people to subscribe to automatic updates.” This information can be text, such as blog posts, it can be audio files (that’s what podcasting uses), it can be things we haven’t even thought of yet.

Right now, you need it in order to keep up with the things you need to know about.

As a reader, you don’t need to care how RSS works or even what the letters mean. You just have to know that it works well, and you can use it – it’s a tool, for you. Just waiting for you to pick it up and go!

Yes, you could bookmark all the sites that you read on a regular basis. But then you’d have to go to those sites to see if there’s new content. This gets tedious and time-consuming. Instead, use the RSS feeds in those sites to bring only the updated content to your RSS reader.

Feedburner (a service for bloggers and others who want to syndicate content with RSS) puts it this way in a blog post about the future of RSS:

Feeds provide three critical benefits to any digital media:
1. A notification mechanism for updates to a specific channel of content
2. The ability to subscribe to content, creating a persistent link between publisher and subscriber
3. A semi-structured version of the content

Ok, now you know what it’s for. Next you need to know how to use it.

For that you need two things.

1. An RSS reader, which, like an email application, will gather together all the RSS feeds to which you subscribe, so that you can peruse them in one handy place.
2. RSS feeds that you want to read.

Coming Thursday – ways to read RSS.
Friday – how to find good stuff to put into your reader.

Here are some articles about RSS:

• What are Webfeeds and why should you care? (highly recommended!)
• RSS: The Web at Your Fingertips
• Save time with syndication
• Order From Chaos Via RSS

If you have any questions, ask them here, and I’ll make sure I address them in the upcoming posts!

Added 3/37/06:
After reviewing my del.icio.us bookmarks, I rediscovered an excellent overview of RSS by Paul Stamatiou.

One technique bloggers have been using to help each other while helping themselves is through Carnivals.

Carnivals are open to blogs in a given subject area, such as cats, medicine, or business. They are run at some pre-determined time interval, usually weekly, or biweekly.

Bloggers send in a link to one of their best posts, and the designated host for the week will write up a post introducing and linking to the selected posts.

It’s a link type of post with a twist — instead of going out and finding good stuff to link to, the host is getting good posts and picks the ones he or she wants to highlight for that week.

These help readers by pointing them to posts and blogs they might be interested in reading. It helps the host because the bloggers in the carnival will most certainly be pointing readers to the hosting blog for that week. And it helps the bloggers by sending readers their way.

It’s win-win-win. And I won’t even mention the search engine boost (it’s technically not a mention if you mention that you’re not mentioning it).

At The Conservative Cat’s website, you’ll find a good intro, listing, and submit form for Carnivals. Be sure to scroll down to the very end and click on the link about viewing a table of the Carnivals. This will give you links and a short paragraph describing all the Carnivals listed.

There’s also a listing at the Blog Carnival index.

There are plenty of Carnivals around, some for the business world. The one I’ve heard of the most is Carnival of the Capitalists.

There’s also one focused on small businesses, called the Carnival of Entrepreneurship. The lastest edition of that (as I write this) is being hosted by Martin at ePublishing Daily.

Ok, I’ve been yammering here for 7 months now about blogging for small businesses. Today I want to direct your attention to another small business blogger out there — one who’s blogging as he builds his online business, months before he’s ready to open.

Mark Nash is building an online store, and blogging about it as he goes along. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the work he’s putting into his e-commerce site, and his latest post, Why Should a Small Business Blog, gives some of his reasons for why he’s blogging. Here’s a brief glimpse of a few of them

1. Creating pre-grand-opening awareness.

For a small online retail business with only a modest outlay for online advertising, then, the challenge is to create advance awareness without spending a ton of cash.

Marketing is certainly one big reason for blogging. I like this twist; I hadn’t thought of it.

4. Getting good advice.

As I continue describing my activities in the time leading up to the launch of the business, I am inviting criticism and discussion. Some of it will be good advice, some of it not so good, but all of it will be worth giving some consideration to.

People are curious, and they love a good story, especially one that’s unfolding before their eyes. This guy is a savvy blogger. (Although he’s using Google’s Blogger platform! He’s got a few reasons for doing so, but really, Mark, Blogger is so limited. If you want free and simple, Wordpress.com has better tools.) My bet is that people will come to his blog and won’t be able to resist participating, via the comments.

I know plenty of people will be coming via the link from Darren Rowse, of Problogger. That’s how I got there.

Check it out!