Nielsen//Netratings announced that nearly three-quarters of U.S. active Web users connected at home via broadband in May 2006, growing 15 percentage points over a year ago. The interesting thing is, those who use broadband are more likel to make better use of Internet technologies such as RSS feeds and blogging.

While narrowband users are still using blog, web page building tool and RSS, they are less likely to do so compared to those broadband users.

Compared to their narrowband-using counterparts, broadband users are
over three times as likely to use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as a
delivery method for their preferred Internet content. They
are also more than twice as likely to publish a blog, or build a personal
Web page.

Although many people hate the RSS term and think it is too techie for average users, the uses of the very term in the sub-headline of a press release could mean something.

As broadband becomes more common, we could expect RSS go mainstream.

Source: Nielsen//Netratings.

Simone Carletti from the RSS World Lab has demonstrated a tool that uses FeedBurner Awareness API. This tool allows you to subscribe through your FeedBurner stats through RSS. You can also compare you feed to others.

The script requires the feeds variable, which in return will spit out RSS 2.0 feed containing the result, whether it is a stat summary of error message.

If you want to use this feed, you have to enable FeedBurner API for feeds you’d like to track (available within your account).

You can get stats of more than one feeds by separating every individual feed with comma.

http://lab.rss-world.info/feedburner-feedstats/stats2feed.php?feeds=YOUR_FEED_URI_1,YOUR_FEED_URI_2, YOUR_FEED_URI_3

Other options include: days, reverse), fulltitle and compare.

Link: RSS World Lab.

Steve Rubel has a great post titled 35 ways you can use RSS today. He is a big fan of RSS, saying that almost every day he find a completely new way to use RSS feeds he hadn’t seen before.

If you want to know what are my favorites, here they are:

• Track drunk athletes
• Real-time severe weather alerts
• Subscribe to personal reminders
• Get notified when must-hate item pops up on eBay
• Monitor for airport delays
• Watch for cheap Travelocity airfares
• Get your horoscope
• Subscribe to TV listings
• Get hotel deals from Marriott
• Learn a new word every day
• Track the latest sales with Dealcatcher

There seems to be many creative use of RSS nowadays. It seems like although the rate of adoption is not as we expected, it slowly gains momentum already.

Source: Micro Persuasion.

Like my other blogs, I am introducing a new blog post format that allows me to quickly point you to interesting stuff that is happening today, but I don’t have many things to comment about. They are still nice to know. There is simply too many things happening in a day in the syndication (and RSS specifically) world that I can’t keep up if I stick only to the usual news and article format.

Some bloggers are against this type of blogging because they think this tactic gives nothing back to them. They don’t want to send their traffic away. There’s simply untrue. By giving short summary and commentary, and posting the link, at the same time I show that my blog is a good resource for people to visit more often, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

So, here are the entries for today:

• Bob Wyman declined that PubSub is in trouble and in danger of shutting its doors soon. However, Read/WriteWeb pointed out that PubSub, once held so much promise as the first real search and innovator in the area of custom RSS feeds, has dropped the ball on the product front.

GoldenCAN has announced that Coupon Integration (Coupons and Recent Price Drops) feature will now be available in XML, RSS and preformatted HTML format (through GetData). The GoldenCAN RSS feature will return a valid RSS document that you can use in any RSS reader and get the data on your website.

With GoldenCAN XML, you will be able to make a simple http call to GoldenCAN and get an XML document back with coupons and recent price drop products of selected merchants.

Finally, GoldenCAN GetData will return a preformatted HTML as you see in GoldenCAN Coupon Integration. You can download this HTML using any programing language such as PHP, ASP, ASP.NET and Java and then display this preformatted HTML on your website with SEO benefits.

Overall, using these three features give more control to affiliate marketers over GoldenCAN Datafeed Integration. Personalization and SEO are two other benefits affliates could get by using these contents on your website.

These features currently are in beta testing.

I’ve seen affiliate networks, e-commerce store and merchants use RSS technology to distribute coupons and special offers. With a bit of programming, you personalize your offering in your webstore and further give more value to your visitors in accordance to your website relevance.

Source: ABestWeb.