RSS can be electrifying.
Or someone has tried to explain it to you and failed. Whatever the case may be, your problem is solved by the Oprah-style explanation of RSS.
RSS is a way to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs. RSS makes it a lot easier and faster for you to get the storeis you care about from around the web.
I use NetVibes for my RSS feeds because it allows me to organize my feeds into topical groups and to see which stories I haven’t read yet.
Thanks for the Netvibes tip, quite a slick interface they’ve put together. I’m pretty comfortable with Bloglines right now, especially after a couple recent UI tweaks they made, but I’ve added the Netvibes button to my blog.
Don’t forget, RSS is also a great way to syndicate your listings and services to other websites.
So, it’s not just for browsing stories, it is a valueable time saving tool which allows you to syndicate your listings and services to many websites automatically.
Matt, I see you guys are live now… Very cool!
thanks Dustin
actually, our official launch will be in about 2 weeks. We got so many requests for beta testers it was getting to messy trying to let people use the listing designer and still trying keep it under wraps…
any comments, and suggestions are welcome.
Can someone tell me in Oprah Style Simplicity, what pinging does for a blog?
Oprah Style Simplicity:
Pinging lets other sites know that a blog has been updated recently.
In case you want more:
There are two uses for this. One is for blog search engines and the other is for trackbacks.
Blog Search Engines: When you hit publish on a RCG post, the blog software automatically pings another server that lets other websites know that your post was just written. This alerts blog search engines (such as Technorati and Google Blog Search) that they should crawl your site immediately if they want some fresh content.
Trackbacks: Assuming everything is configured correctly, when you ping a blog server (which happens automatically on RCG), then you will see a trackback on other blogs if I mentioned one of their posts in particular. Because of spam abuse, trackbacks are commonly turned off by many bloggers.
I’m fairly certain that trackbacks are turned off on my blog. Is that bad? And if so, why?
Assuming trackbacks are working correctly (i.e. you have a good spam filter), then trackbacks foster a dialog because readers on a blog post will know to look at a new blog posts if someone comments and/or adds to the ideas you’ve presented in your blog post.
To give you an idea how this works in practice , trackbacks are automatically recorded between the Bloodhound Blog and RCG all the time (every time we link to each other as a matter of fact!), so that if Greg posts an article on something you wrote (on RCG) then it is elementary to follow the discussion to see Greg’s view…
Also note that trackbacks play to bloggers ego because other bloggers *know* that they will get a link back on your blog posts (in the comments section) if they link to you. For better or worse, I used this feature extensively when I first started blogging to get a link back from “popular” blogs. And some of those trackbacks (like this one to a Business Week article) still send RCG traffic on a regular basis… 🙂
> To give you an idea how this works in practice , trackbacks are automatically recorded between the Bloodhound Blog and RCG all the time (every time we link to each other as a matter of fact!), so that if Greg posts an article on something you wrote (on RCG) then it is elementary to follow the discussion to see Greg’s view…
And this is where WordPress’ excellent trackbacks are less than ideal. When I do a link-of-links post or a simple one-liner, as opposed to a more elaborate take on another weblog’s post, I will not invoke the explicit trackbacks (as, for example, on TypePad weblogs). I’m not looking for return traffic or advising readers at the other weblog that I’ve said something of moment, so I don’t worry about the trackback. On the other hand, I really like not having to do anything except link, so I’ll take WordPress, warts and all.