Treat your feeds with the same care that you do your pages.

1. Make sure feed titles are optimized with keywords (they become the browser location title). The same goes for the feed description. Utilize it.
   ex. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rss/tag/Barack+Obama.rss
2. Syndicate the full content of your posts, html encoded and add your tags to those posts. Those tags link back to your site and are great to keep spiders that might have only found your feed on the move.
   ex. http://www.croncast.com/keyrss/Longaberger.rss
3. Add an extension to your feeds. Don’t leave it empty, leave it as .xml, .rdf or .your-coding-lanugage create a rewrite for .rss - it says exactly what the feed is to a user and extensions make bots happy.
   ex. http://www.lifeinthecan.com/episodes.rss
   

Something to keep in mind if you are doubting feeds can improve your already optimized site, where do you think that most of those Google alerts come from? Hint: It’s not your site pages.

In this video of a presentation I gave at Duke University last year I not only share my knowledge and experience with authenticated RSS feeds but also - RSS metrics, personalized RSS feeds, RSS for education and professional development within the enterprise and using RSS to enhance SEO.

I do say at the beginning of this presentation that authenticated feeds are boring but if you are into this kind of thing it’s like taking a hot RSS shower.

I also touch on the platform that I developed, Castlock, that has evolved into PostZinger. Which, I’m hearing good things about these days.

Great news from The Guardian UK on the RSS front - full feeds, some custom paths but . . . they are only half the way there from where they could be.

Why not do this, Make better RSS feeds by not making them, ahem.

Don’t get me wrong, I think what the Guardian is doing is taking a step in the right direction but I can’t help but wonder what is taking publishers so looooong to catch on that they have the ability to create small UI enhancements that can make their content completely accessible down to a very granular level. Like to the keyword or phrase level.

Creating multiple prescribed filters and mocking up ways that users can then modify the feeds is a historic FAIL that not only The Guardian falls into but every publisher I have ever seen.

Wake up, nerds!

It’s all the about the UX and making this simple. RSS can be so much more.

To be fair, yes, publisher techs work hard to make feed variety happen but it makes more sense for them to take further steps that can welcome the average user to the party through UI enhancements instead of a list of 25+ feeds.

Here’s a living, breathing example of how even a small blog from one of the world’s largest sewing machine manufacturers does it - Bernina Blog. Sure, it’s more of an advanced operation but with a cleaner UI (I’ve built some and they’re pretty) the content can begin to flow.

Tell me that a publisher like The Guardian UK couldn’t blow out system like this and offer their entire library of content with ease!

Over the weekend, as some of you may of you noticed, I live photo blogged my Saturday afternoon date with Betsy and our trip to Goodwill. For me it was a time to watch Betsy as she navigated her adopted habitat and to see her operate in a way that is far from the norm in our everyday lives.

I knew this was going to be an interesting experience. Why not share it in as many ways as possible (distribution to: Flickr, Twitter, blog and RSS) with as many people as possible? One input with multiple outputs across the various Croncast audiences.

Making it happen is a lot easier than you think with email and RSS.

First. it is the camera phone that takes decent photos. Second, is the phones ability to send email with photo attachments. Third, is a place to email the photos that has an RSS feed or other API connectivity to other applications. Tons of sites like Flickr, Seesmic and Tumblr offer these and can even do some of the distribution for you. Get these three things in place and sharing your experiences in near real-time has never been easier.

Currently, it does take a little more skill to distribute the photos to Twitter. However, if you get creative you can breathe life into photos that wouldn’t normally have existed after it was consumed/viewed in a photo sharing site or through an RSS reader. It is worth the effort to figure this out, it’s the next stage of content distribution online.

How do I know? Google Reader shared feeds are the perfect example. Typically once someone reads a post in their reader it has reached the end of the line. But if someone shares it with Google Reader it then gets added to the individual users shared RSS feed and resyndicated. A new life for that content. The same goes for photos that end up in Flickr or a Flickr RSS feed.

In my case, live photo blogging and my ability to cast a wider net wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the Flickr RSS feed from my account. It is the magic API that feeds (pun intended) the river of resyndication that allows me to give that new life to our content.

Here’s how it goes down:

1. Upload photo from phone to Flickr with subject line used as image title
2. In the body under the photo begin with an asterisk (*) if I want the photo, title and description to be a blog post also
3. In the body under the photo begin with a carat (^) if I want the title and a link to be a tweet
4. Add both asterisk and carat (*^) for blog and twitter
5. A PHP script grabs the Flickr RSS feed and reads it for asterisks and carats every two minutes and sends the photo, title and description where it needs to go
6. If it goes to the blog the title and description will be run through a keyword generations script
7. If it goes to Twitter only the title is sent and a shortened url is created to link to the photo

What all of this does is allow me to create multiple channels of distribution that can reach the different audiences that follow us. There is a bit of overlap with multiple audience members subscribed to the same services but quite a few are not. We have the Twitter audience, the blog audience, the flickr audience and the RSS audience. We also have our podcast audience but they are not really a part of this type of delivery

Summary: Look for ways to utilize sites like Flickr as a content management portal, if even from your mobile phone, to cast a wider net across your network. Work to find that one point of contact that has the lowest threshold for allowing you to get your media and thoughts online with the ability to resyndicate your content without having to lift a finger. Well, too many fingers. And make sure that it has an RSS feed!

Did you pick the content of the RSS feeds that you are syndicating from your site right now? Or did you let your readers pick?

Within reason my guess would be that most of you answered, yes then no. I know on my sites, even this site, I would have answered the same.

The solution isn’t to create more feeds. The best solution is for publishers to create no feeds at all. Let your readers make their own.

Here are a couple examples why this is a better method for content syndication than relying on your own editorial skills.

Example 1: How not to make good RSS.

Don’t get me wrong on this, CNET is offering nearly all of its content up for syndication. This is an excellent strategy to create value from older content. However, do readers really need the option of subscribing to 100 plus predefined RSS feeds? Simply, no.

Finding feeds for the topics you are interested in is difficult. The worst of it is that you can only access them individually, i.e.; you want 10 of feeds, copy and paste them one by one into your feed reader. Sounds like a party to me. If you have more skills you might use a service that rolls all of them up into one feed for you. I would guess that about three people have done this.

Why overwhelm your readers like this? And besides, it is pretty intimidating for someone new to the RSS game. Shouldn’t they be able to access your content in a way that makes it relevant to them?

Example 2: How to do RSS right.

What you see above is one of two flavors of how to let your readers pick what they receive in RSS feeds. It’s a simple and easy to use text input that allows readers to enter keywords and phrases that they want in their feed. There’s nothing fancy, easy access to old content in the straight-forward way that RSS is delivered; updates of the newest items first and set number items in the feed, usually twenty-five.

What the second screen shot shows is the magic of thinking differently about RSS feeds. This image demonstrates what happens when someone clicks on the ‘advanced’ link. The reader is then given control over every aspect of the RSS feed. They choose the content, when it is delivered, how much content, in what order (none of this newest stuff first mumbo jumbo - great use for episodic content) and how many updates to get at a time.

Who is better to choose than the person doing the consuming? RSS needs to be like Burger King where a customer can have it their way.

When this concept is applied to large volumes of content the value of it increases with each new article or podcast. Imagine if you could have this type of access at the NY Times or with your local paper. Even the obits from 30 years ago are now of value again. Value to the reader and value to the publisher with ad inventory.

The future of content syndication isn’t in prescriptive channels created by publishers. The future is in the subjective choices of the consumer. They neither need or want every product that you have to offer.

We need to be smarter about our syndicated content via RSS and take into consideration how to make that user experience more satisfying. Whether it is by allowing users to pick topics or order of updates, something needs to change. Why? Because it is all about attention; the premium of which is measured in subscribers, influence and the influence of those subscribers.

RSS is many things to many people:

• It’s a quick way to syndicate content with ease
• Ability to receive automatic news updates
• Automated submission to catalogs and search engines

But there is one thing that RSS is amazing at that is often overlooked . . . it is a low-threshold API.

The data that can and is loaded into RSS feeds can be easily parsed and used in other applications. A good example of this would be two feeds from Flickr - the main user feed and the comment feed. By default the main user feed comes packed with 95% of the data that is available for an uploaded photo like date, time, size, username, title, etc. The main user feed combined with the comment feed gives you nearly open access to the data and activity around your photos.

To get the same data from their formally structured API you need to make roughly 5 API calls, have a ‘token’ and be able to locate an uploaded photo’s internal GUID. Uh, yeah. No thanks Flickr.

When you are looking to a service provider’s API to supply you with data, you might want to first take a look to see if they are offering RSS feeds also. This could cut down on your development time by not having to learn their entire schema and idiosyncratic jargon. Feeds are simple . . . view source to get the namespaces and parse as needed.

This post, Think differently about RSS and its uses, explains this flickr example even further.

Metrics conversations are some of the most frequent when it comes to RSS subscriber measurement. However, for the last few years our focus has been a bit off. Feedburner, prior to sale to Google, talked an awful lot about engagement and how to measure it. Now Cullect.com founder and podcast pioneer Garrick Van Buren is moving us forward again with ‘importance‘.

“Reading a straight RSS feed, let along a double- or triple-digit number of them, without any filtering is a little like checking email without a spam filter. There’s a lot of stuff you just don’t need to pay any attention to. “

The first experience that most people have with customizing RSS is by adding an RSS icon to a webpage or changing the default one that came with their blog to match their customized version.

Here are some links that can get you started in your quest for the perfect RSS Icon:

feed icons - http://www.feedicons.com/
bittbox - http://www.bittbox.com/freebies/free-glass-style-rssfeed-icons/
grunge - http://customize.org/icons/55872
menekali - http://www.menekali.com/all-the-rss-icons-youll-ever-need/ (so they say!)