Expedia Takes the Lead in Travel RSS Feeds

My greatest gripe against RSS marketing initiatives is that they're just poorly done.

You have a great company with an amazing product database that just calls for customized feeds ... and all you get from their RSS feeds are one-size-fits-all packages.

Really a waste. No one wants to receive updates on all US flights ... they just want to receive updates on the flights that really interest them. And here's the real power of RSS: bringing the most relevant content.

Expedia seems to understand that, at least based on their new RSS offering.

They allow you to customize your feed with Trip Type, your originating city, your destination and your package type.

Well, they could still do alot more, such as providing the option of selecting a price range, but it's a good beginning.

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Google Blog Search Indexes Digg and Techmeme
Despite the gripes about Google Blog Search and its inability to filter out spam, the site has been improving steadily. It now indexes lots of non-news content as long as it is published in a feed. For example. Google Blog...

Clarification: FeedBurner Does NOT Require Users to Point at Their Domain

Yeah, I blundered.

In a recent article I wrote:
"If you've explored the RSS space in more detail you know that free services like FeedBurner allow you to easily place ads in your feeds and measure the feeds themselves, but they require you to direct your visitors to a republished version of your feed on their server."

Quite wrong, as I was kindly corrected by Traci Hailpern from FeedBurner.

Actually, the premium FeedBurner service MyBrand allows you to do exactly that: use all of the benefits of FeedBurner, but instead of directing your visitors to a republished version of your feed on their server, the MyBrand service allows you to serve your feed from your own domain, retaining all the SEO benefits of RSS.

A big "I'm sorry" to you, the readers, and to FeedBurner.

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

What Happened to the Site?

Since I started receiving e-mail about what happened to this site and why it hasn't been updated since my trip to Chicago, here goes:)

1. Two days after I came back from Chicago I held a 5 day workshop for my internet team from Central and Eastern Europe. Doing lectures half of the day, and providing entertainment the other half.

2. Right after the workshop I had to fly to Poland to find a new internet manager for our operation there.

3. My grandfather was recently hospitilized due to heart failiure, which is near fatal at his age, so things have been pretty hecting on the family side of life as well.

4. I'm working on finishing three RSS books and need to finish up all of them shortly. Long-time visitors will remember that when I was finishing "Unleash RSS" back in the end of 2004 I had to take a short break from the site, since it's difficult to write a book and write for a website at the same time.

5. I'm running on a tight deadline to finish a large webstore that is going to be launched accross 20 countries in Central and Eastern Europe this month and promoted with more than 100 hours of daily DRTV airtime.

So, to make a long story short, life and other RSS related and unrelated projects got the better of me.

But not to worry, I promise to get started again in full force early next month:

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Frank Kern Audio and PDF Leaked to Public

RSS Really Starting to Move Towards E-mail Marketers

Email Reaction is another e-mail vendor following the certain trend of RSS going the way of e-mail marketing ... in terms of direct marketing capabilities of course.

Although they're just entering beta testing with their solution, they promise RSS feed personalization, the holy grail for direct marketers, as well as full RSS integration in their software, to make the move towards RSS easier for e-mail marketers.

The first to offer this type of integration and personalization were SilverPop, although it still remain to be seen how Email Reaction will compete with their feature set.

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

$10,652.00 in Bonuses for Shawn Casey's "How To Make An Absolute Fortune..."

How To Make An Absolute Fortune in the Information Products Business by Shawn Casey

links for 2006-12-29
Macworld: Feature: Here comes high definition "Is now the time to plop down money for an HD camcorder? That depends on how cutting-edge you are." (tags: HDTV video gadgets) ProgrammableWeb Mashup Detail: GMaps Flight Tracker View incoming flights into 7...

Internet Audiences Growing: How Will You Respond?

Please Share the RSS Marketing Survey

Please help us make the RSS Marketing Survey as comprehensive as possible. All participants get the full survey report, and all the key data will be shared publicly.

1. Please take a few minutes and participate by clicking here.

2. Please share this URL (http://rsspoll.marketingstudies.net) with as many people as you can. Post it on your blog, send it out in your newsletter, mention it to your RSS peers ... :)

Really, the more data we get, the better results we'll be able to provide to you.

The goal of the survey is to research the RSS marketing landscape, collect top RSS marketing case studies and best practices, and find which key factors make successful RSS strategies successful.

BTW - the survey is getting alot of support from many marketers, such as Christopher Knight, RSS Ray, Lee Odden and may others (full list will be published after I return from Chicago).

And today we've just been covered by MarketingSherpa as well:
"If you've tested offering RSS and have any results to share, author/researcher Rok Hrastnik is seeking your input for the second edition of his report on the topic. We like Rok -- he's a genuine and enthusiastic researcher on the topic and worth supporting so the whole community can learn together."

Great thanks to everyone that's helping make the survey a success!

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

links for 2006-12-24
Google Passes Yahoo in Tally of Visitors Google displaced Yahoo as the world s second-most-visited Web site in November (tags: Google Yahoo Search Stats Traffic) Best (and Worst) Ads of '06 - WSJ.com "It Was the Year of Cavemen, YouTube and...