There is a new RSS service in town — already generating buzz: xFruits. It teaches your feeds all kinds of new tricks, as Steve Rubel said it. Here are several functions of the web service, with more to come in the future:

• Aggregator RSS - Aggregate several syndication feeds into a single feed.
• RSS to Web - Change a syndication feed in a web page.
• RSS to Mobile - Automatically create your mobile website version from a blog with an RSS feed.
• Post to RSS - Get an RSS feed of all emails sent to an Xfruits mailbox. Get several persons writing on that mailbox and get an RSS feed of it.
• RSS to PDF - Create a PDF file from an RSS feed, automatically set for printing. It also includes a bokmark by source, title and author.

RSS to Mail, File to RSS and Composer features are disabled, which indicate that they will be added in the future.

These are really some good uses of RSS for you to consider adding to your toolkit. While they aren’t new, it is very convenient to have some great tools all in one place, using a single login.

Via: Micro Persuasion.
Link: xFruits.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It makes content syndication simple. Really.

But, the marketing power of RSS may not be obvious immediately.

When it comes to online marketing, there are a lot of tactics and strategies that can help increase your online visibility and exposure. Most of us have ever heard about search engine marketing and optimization, email marketing, business blogging, Internet advertising, branding, etc.

The good news is, they are all effective in each of the elements they have been designed for.

Search engine marketing and optimization allows marketers to attract traffic from search engines which are searching for product, service or information. Chances are the visitors have no clue about your business, especially if you are a small business.

Email marketing is a great customer retention tool for building relationship gradually with prospects or customers.

None of them is one for all solution, neither is RSS.

The unique thing in RSS is, albeit simple, it has the potential to empower and enhance many different marketing strategies we have mentioned above.

For the last few years, we had seen how RSS brought profound effects to businesses of any sizes, including individuals.

What are we talking about here?

Blogging and podcasting.

They tap into the power of RSS to deliver text, image and multimedia content to consumers.

Still, those are only a small part of what RSS could bring to the table.

The fact that because RSS usually works behind the scene, it is often overlooked by most marketers. Even if they have ever heard about it, they do not understand the technology fully to integrate it to their marketing mix as a strong and indispensable tool.

While RSS had been around for years, it is still considered in its very early stage in development and application. When most other businesses still don’t realize the potential it has besides just syndicating blog content and podcasting, it is your opportunity to thrive.

The latest online news accessorry is personalized pages with RSS feed syndication support, reports paidContent. It started with New York Times’s MyTimes.com beta a few weeks ago, followed by My USA Today News and now MyWSJ.

The Wall Street Journal personalized content includes stock quotes, weather forecast, traffic information, news, saved searches, press releases and more. The service is separated from the Journals’ first personalization service, My Online Journal.

Of those three, only MyWSJ is ad free for now. The power of syndication allows not only personalized content from own site but also aggregation from other news, blogs, and other web feed enabled services.

Of particularly interesting is a comment from Steve Rubel. He said that if rather than just link to them, it could create a potential lucrative feed advertising platform if WSJ actually cache the feed content. A partnership with Pheedo or FeedBurner could result in revenue sharing between three parties: publishers, the ad network and WSJ.

Because the content are displayed on WSJ, they could possible charged premium fee for every displayed ad.

Well, that might be one good way to monetize traffic but I guess WSJ have a greater plan. If they are going to make money with selling advertising space, that should be more profitable than having ads in feeds.

I agree that to some extent caching feed content will be valuable to encourage more eyeballs but web feed syndication is just one component of the whole personalized content. What if users place syndicated news at the bottom fold of the page? The ads might as well go unseen.

WSJ have to test extensively before deciding if they want to cache feed content, because that will consume gigantic resources.

That also means WSJ depends too much on Pheedo or FeedBurner. Sounds bad.

But if they choose to sell their own advertising space, they have more control as to where to place the ads to achieve maximum views. In this case, WSJ have to be very careful with feed content, or keep displaying only headlines.

Sources: paidContent, Micro Persuasion.

FeedBurner has acquired Blogbeat, an online service that provides insight about your blog including who is reading what posts, which blog post is most popular, and others. In the near future, Q4 2006, Blogbeat’s core functionality will be integrated into FeedBurner.

Blogbeat also uses the feed as a foundation for statistics about blog posts and activity, making it a great complement to FeedBurner.

Existing Blogbeat users will get a refund because the service will be incorporated into FeedBurner’s StandardStats service, which is free. Wow…

In the mean time, current Blogbeat users will still be supported but a migration to FeedBurner is required in the future. So if you are not familiar with the latter, better be prepared. Both services will provide deeper insights about your blog and feed.

Source: FeedBurner.
Link: Blogbeat.

Wimbledon tennis tournament have setup an RSS feed. You can get updated news related to Wimbledon from the official Wimbledon 2006 site.

CNN Money has an interview with Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner. The Business 2.0 magazine interview article discusses how RSS technology works and heads to. It also covers the challenge FeedBurner has to raise venture capital.

State of Washington Governor Christine O. Gregoire has declared that Friday June 30 and Saturday July 1 as RSS Days during Gnomedex opening session.

NewsGator is one of the companies to listen to in the RSS and syndication world, so when CTO Greg Reinaker announced their roadmap for the next 16 months, it makes a good read. The company will focus on synchronization among desktop, online and mobile, social networking, podcasting on the phone, advertising, enterprise and private label possibilities.