There has been a wave of Internet folks bemoaning the death of RSS. They’re getting it wrong. RSS is not dying exactly, but its fate is expected and appropriate.

For those of you who need a refresher on what RSS is, see my post on RSS demystified.

Why RSS sucks

There are some big reasons why RSS sucks. Most of it actually has to do with RSS readers.

On the surface, RSS seems really kind of awesome. “I can get updates from all of my favorite sites all in one spot.” Many people in fact do want to browse less so they can get on with their lives.

But many of us do not know our limits and find ourselves hoarding information through RSS readers like Google Reader. There is no cost or immediate consequences involved with subscribing to RSS feeds for everything that the Web has to offer. But then we find ourselves with an RSS reader list so long that it’s paralyzing to try and keep up.

Lastly, an RSS reader is yet another inbox. Lately, I’ve found it to be stressful to have so many inboxes to check up on: email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Netflix queue, podcasts, DVR queue, voicemail, text messages, OmniFocus, and the physical inbox on my desk. Enough is enough.

Seriously, all of these queues have turned my life’s purpose into unbolding all of the new shit.

Problem: RSS has been about the technology, not the user

RSS to this point has been about the technology, not necessarily about the users of the technology. If you have trouble understanding that statement, look at what RSS widgets used to look like:

So confusing. Sure, most sites didn’t show that many widgets, but many of the icons on their own are confusing unless you understand what RSS or XML are.

What does RSS mean? What about XML? What does it have to do with coffee cups and pills? Really, the only good buttons have said “Subscribe,” but I can imagine how confusing it would be to click that button and get a bunch of XML back. What do I do with that?

Good uses for RSS

Here are some valid uses for RSS. Notice that none of them really involve adding a little RSS icon to your interface. All of these uses are really about masking the technology behind the features. RSS enables the feature but isn’t the feature itself.

1. “Subscribe by email” option

RSS at one time was a hopeful attempt at replacing email (or at least minimizing it). Google Wave was also an attempt to replace email. But people love their email! It’s not going away anytime soon.

Services like FeedBurner allow you to send daily emails to subscribers with a digest of the latest items from your feed. You create a post on your blog, and people receive notification about it via email within a day.

The user doesn’t know or care that RSS is powering this mechanism. They just know that they’re receiving updates from your site.

2. Automatically tweet links to your new articles or blog posts on Twitter

Services like Twitterfeed and FeedBurner (again) can watch your site’s RSS feed and tweet links to your new articles automatically. People following you on Twitter see your tweets, not an RSS feed.

Again, the user doesn’t know or care that RSS is powering this. They use Twitter, not Google Reader.

3. Podcasts

When you subscribe to a podcast in iTunes, you’re technically subscribing to RSS. There’s a chance that you may not have even known that, dear reader.

Again, people call that a podcast, not RSS. Heck, podcasts even have their own icon that I bet more people recognize than RSS’s.

4. News and link streams on your site

With some programming, you can mash up any number of RSS feeds and display the latest headlines on your site. Use an interface like Yahoo! Pipes, publish that feed, and use it to power a news stream on your site.

Again, visitors will see the news stream, but they won’t know or care that it’s powered by RSS.

Again, notice a theme here?

All of my suggestions above are about using RSS for what it is: a technology. RSS as a technology is only a means to an end. It is not a feature.

The users of the Web have spoken. Highlighting this particular technology just isn’t effective with your normal everyday person. So stop it.

Technorati Tags: email, Email Marketing, emails, feed, feedburner, feeds, google, really simple syndication, rss, rss feed, rss feeds, Technology, user experience, xml

I love this, and I love what this does for blogging.

A ton of bloggers used to just use their blog to share shallow one-liners and pointer links to other meaningful posts, but now they’ve all pretty much migrated to the social networking sites. I’m glad that they’ve moved on to a medium that’s more fitting.

Now is a time of tremendous opportunity for blogging and article writing. While the thrill of sharing a link on Twitter is certainly instantly gratifying (which can feel really good), I’ve noticed that the people doing the real work have been dwindling.

This is where you come in.

Now is the time for you to be creating thoughts larger than 140 characters and putting yourself out there. Sure, it’s OK to point to other sources when it’s appropriate and to lean on others’ ideas occasionally. But now is the time to have something worth saying and to cut through the noise. Believe me, there is plenty of noise out there.

Give your fellow tweeters something worth talking about. They need you, and they need to have some of your ideas to spread.

Technorati Tags: blog, Blogging, blogs, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, facebook, glass case, internet marketing, marketing, opportunity, twitter, Writing

Look at these wildly popular bloggers:

• Seth Godin has written many, many books and uses his blog as practice for shaping ideas for new ones.
• Jessica Hagy draws really funny charts and uses her blog as a vehicle for delivering them.
• Hugh MacLeod draws hilarious cartoons and chronicles work challenges while doing it.
• 37signals builds great software and writes books. They challenge the status quo in the software industry.
• Matthew Inman draws beautiful and funny cartoons and shares many of them for free.

What do they all share? They’ve done something. They’ve produced and shipped something of meaning. They share a lot of original thought. They rarely regurgitate others’ work.

So no, blogging is not enough. You need to be building something of meaning. You need to be producing art. Then you work on connecting with others on Twitter and your blog.

Less tweeting, more working.

Eating my own dog food

This post is a reminder to myself about what I’m trying to do. I don’t fit the description that I wrote above. I’m filled with potential, but I haven’t yet shipped. I work on it most every day though. Do you?

I need to practice what I preach and eat my own dog food. Hypocrite alert!

Technorati Tags: Blogging, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, hypocricy, internet marketing, Writing

Have you ever noticed that some magically have pictures next to them, and some are disinterested looking block face guys?

These images are called Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars). I know, super nerdy. Why didn’t they just name them Galactic Klinginoids and just call it a day?

The gist of Gravatars:

• You upload a square image of yourself (or whatever) at gravatar.com.
• You associate the image with an email address.
• The picture that you uploaded shows whenever you enter that email address in a blog comment form.

Sure, your Gravatar won’t show up on websites that don’t support them. But it’s a nice way to have a photo that you control appear next to your name with little effort on the sites that do support it.

Here’s what my Gravatar looks like on most blogs:

It’s best to choose a photo that will look good as a square like the one above. You’ll be forced to select a square section of the image after you upload it.

As you can see in my example above, I chose to chop off the top of my head. (It looked weird from the top of my head to the bottom of my lips or centered.) That’s probably how a head shot will look best for you as well. Be sure to play around with it a little and see what looks best.

For more info, check out the video that they have posted on the Gravatar home page:

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Branding, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, commenting, glass case, gravatar, internet marketing, Social Media, wordpress

Paul Boag’s recent podcast episode feature, 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging, caught me with my pants down.  Read through this absolute truth:

The purpose of most corporate blogs is to build and maintain brand awareness while motivating users to engage. None of that needs to happen on site. The blog post itself builds and maintains awareness, while requests for comments or calls to action motivates users to engage. Users do not need to see the rest of your site to respond to the copy of a blog post. Of course for that to be true, posts need to be engaging.

Honestly, I’m not sure why I’ve been obsessed with forcing you to click through to my blog. I apologize for being so ignorant and stubborn. And I hope that this sort of advice helps you think of ways that you may be robbing your customers’ of their time for no gain on either side of the table.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, corporate blogging, feed, feeds, glass case, internet marketing, rss, rss feed, rss feeds

I am a fan of FeedBurner. But URLs are permanent.

What happens when you have visitors subscribe to a standard feeds.feedburner.com URL?

• People subscribe to a URL owned by Google.
• If you want to discontinue the use of FeedBurner, you’ll lose those people because you don’t own the feedburner.com domain.

FeedBurner was really cool to offer their MyBrand service. Basically, MyBrand allows you to point people to your domain name instead of theirs. For example, when you subscribe to my feed, you’re subscribing to feeds.clearcrystalmedia.com. But under the hood, the feed is powered by FeedBurner.

This is awesome because if I ever wish to discontinue using FeedBurner, or if they ever discontinue their service, I can still host my own feed at feeds.clearcrystalmedia.com/glass-case. Basically, I won’t lose anyone in the process.

This requires a little bit of technical wizardry. If your web guy or hosting company cannot handle it, then you may want to consider switching web guys and/or hosting companies.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, feedburner, glass case, google, mybrand, rss

When is the last time that you commented on a blog post that you read? It’s time to challenge yourself to have a conversation on the next blog post that you read. (It doesn’t have to be this post, but that wouldn’t hurt!)

Technorati Tags: blog, Blogging, blogs, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, comment, commenting, comments, glass case, internet marketing, social web, web 2.0

I’ll admit that part of the problem is that I’m not being interesting enough (which I’m working on). And the rest of it is that I haven’t taken a real stand on who I’m writing to. Or at least it hasn’t been super clear up to this point.

The point is that I’m not the only one with this problem, and this problem isn’t limited to my industry. There is a lot of noise out there. I actually was successful a few months ago in convincing a client that she shouldn’t start a blog. And that’s just plain heresy when you work in marketing!

The difference between me and a lot of people is that most aren’t even aware that they have this problem. Is writing blog posts really worth your time if you don’t have enough time to invest in rising above the crowd?

So here’s where I stand at least. I’m writing to you if…

• You own a small business. The smaller, the better.
• You don’t know a whole lot about using the Internet to market your business.
• You are don’t quite understand technology but know that it’s necessary.
• You want to learn some tips here and there. You don’t want to be an expert, but you want to learn.
• You aren’t sure who to trust amongst all of these “experts” that are clogging up the proverbial blogosphere.
• Bonus: You are in Columbus, Ohio, and there’s a chance that I may meet you at some point in time.

Most of the comments that I get on my blog are from other marketers. This worries me. If you don’t meet the criteria of the bullet points above, then I may be boring you. And you’re probably leaving a comment because you want other visitors to come to your blog. Worst of all, you’re not contributing to the conversation. You’re just adding more noise.

If you’re Sharon Thomas of Permanent Ink, then welcome! (And thanks for hanging out over the past year.)

If you’re Seth Godin, then you’re probably bored.

Technorati Tags: blog, Blogging, blogs, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, glass case, interestingness, internet marketing, marketing, small business

All that you need to do after following these tips is create the killer content!

Use FeedBurner

I’ve mentioned FeedBurner before, but let me revisit it. It’s really easy to set up, and it’s very effective at allowing you to publicize your blog and report on usage of your blog’s RSS feeds. (What is RSS?)

One of the most valuable services that FeedBurner offers is called PingShot. This service lets other publication services know when you create a new blog post. Your post then automatically gets publicized and updated on those services.

Someone I know once voiced a concern about FeedBurner: “What if FeedBurner goes out of business?” Well, FeedBurner was acquired by Google, so I’m thinking that you don’t have anything to worry about there.

Here’s my previous review of FeedBurner.

Technorati tags

Basically, you add links to the end of your blog post called “tags.” They point to Technorati tag pages with other blog posts related to yours. For example, here’s the tag page for internet marketing.

When FeedBurner’s PingShot tells Technorati that your blog has been updated, Technorati visits your site. If Technorati sees any of these tags on your new post, it will put your new post on its related tag pages.

What’s the big deal then? Search engines like to see you sharing the wealth in terms of linking to other content on the Web. By adding Technorati tags to your posts, you are linking to other related content. And this related content in turn links right back to you!

To see how Technorati tags work, play around with Eric Myers’s Tag Generator.

Use WordPress

WordPress is the de facto blogging platform. The standard. And one of the best things about it is its support for plugins. Plugins allow you to easily change how your blog works. You can use plugins for improved SEO and to improve the general user experience of your blog.

Here are some good plugins:

• FeedBurner FeedSmith: Points your blog’s feed links to FeedBurner so users don’t subscribe to the wrong feed.
• WP Tags to Technorati: Changes your WordPress blog’s tags into Technorati tags automatically.
• MCEComments: Add formatting controls to the comment box so the commenter can add links, bold formatting, italic formatting, etc.
• reCAPTCHA: Add a CAPTCHA word puzzle for commenters to solve to eliminate spam. When they solve the puzzle, they are also helping universities scan books.
• SimpleTwitter: Lets you automatically display your most recent Twitter tweet on your blog.

Enhance your blog code for SEO

MyTypes has a great starter guide for some SEO changes for your WordPress theme. I recommend following his steps under Page Titles, Duplicate Content, and Change Permalink Structure. Ignore the rest.

Bold the key phrase in each paragraph

You should bold the key phrase in each paragraph. What single group of words summarizes what the entire paragraph is about?

A lot of people like to scan content to see if they’d like to read it further. Showing short summaries in each paragraph helps give them hints on whether or not they’d be interested in the contents. On top of that, search engines give a little extra weight to these bolded words. If you’re using your key phrases correctly, you may end up bolding some words that are important for your SEO strategy as well.

Again, create good content

Hopefully these tips will uncover some ideas for you that you didn’t know were helpful—or maybe even possible.

But I must remind you that your efforts will be in vain if the content of your blog isn’t good to begin with. Always be thinking about your blog and what you can be writing about. Then you can just let it flow when you sit down and open up WordPress.

Photo credit: I won’t write you a love song… by Mademoiselle Ayumi. Some rights reserved.

Technorati Tags: blog, Blogging, blogs, ccm, chris peters, clear crystal media, internet marketing, marketing, Search Marketing, seo, web marketing