I found this comment from Craig McGinty on Robin Hamman's blog, and I couldn't resist republishing it here, as the mind-boggling importance of RSS is one of my hobby horses:
Something any online publication has to appreciate is that their audience is no longer at the bottom of the funnel, being drip-fed news and features. Thanks to RSS (I accept it's still early days but its use is growing) people have now flipped the funnel and can vacuum up what interests them and roll their own news service.
They can stay in touch with what they want, when they want and turn the tap off once happy. Publications need to slice their content up so that people can follow sections, make it easy to follow comments via RSS or subscribe to keywords wrapped up in a feed that tells them when something new is published. It might not be possible to hit all these marks at the same time but they are worth having on the agenda.
I could say that I keep praying for newspapers to slice up their content in sections, like in why don't The Times (UK) and Börsen (DK) have media feeds available, but that would be a lie: in the end, when a publication hasn't sliced up its feed in this way, I just stop reading it...
Hi Kristine
I have an RSS feed from the Times echoes in my sidebar.
They have about 40 RSS feeds available here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/audio_video/rss/
Link at bottom of front page.
Cheers
Matt
btw Revisiting - I'll be putting out a review of your blog out at 12pm on Monday, as I am now building my new blogroll one link at a time.
Posted by: Matt Wardman | May 19, 2007 at 01:43 PM
Thanks. Only problem with the Times' RSS feeds is that I can't find a media feed among them. I know they have a good media editor, but I don't want to wade thru both business and technology feeds to pick out the media bits. I tried creating my own feed from the media sector under business' industry sectors, but only threw up a few articles before it stopped working.
I know I'm a bit absent minded due to the million projects I'm involved in, and give up too easily when such trivial things don't appear to have instant solutions, so am only too happy if someone tells me I have overlooked something obvious here.
This by the way, is also why my blog isn't that technologically advanced. I know I could have done much more with RSS-feeds, and restructuring my blogroll is an ongoing process, but since I do this for fun next to a very hectic work life, these things tend to get pushed to the bottom of my agenda
Posted by: Kristine | May 20, 2007 at 11:28 AM
You can probably solve this problem with a little help from Google News. Here's my suggestion:
1. Go to http://news.google.com/
2. In the search field, write/paste
site:http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/
3. Click the search button, and the latest Media news from The Times shows up.
4. Click RSS in the left menu, and you've got a RSS feed of The Times' Media section!
...and this should hopefully work for other web sites as well:)
Posted by: Hans P Fosseng | July 12, 2007 at 01:40 PM
Thanks, will give it a try
Posted by: Kristine | July 13, 2007 at 02:53 PM