Online Promotion With RSS

24Oct07

Online presence is all about getting noticed. You won’t bee seen by anyone if you don’t do anything to be seen. The same is true in the real world and as Dubber puts it:

“It’s one thing to write the greatest book in the world, but if all you’re going to do is put it in a library and hope people check it out, you may as well not have bothered. “

This illustrates the point of marketing and promotion. You can’t just rely on people to find things by themselves.

On the internet it’s all about getting attention, and less about making money, when you got the attention you can start thinking about making a profit from it. This is called “Attention Economy”, and basically means that what everybody is fighting for online is attention. On the internet, money is not the most important scarce resource, Information certainly isn’t a scarce resource – the Web contains oceans of it, Horsley (2004). Goldhaber introduced the term attention economy back in 1997 and his point is outlined nicely by Horsley (2004):

“The Web’s scarce resource is attention, because there is so much information out there, and everyone has so little time to look at it. To triumph on the Web is to have lots of people giving attention to your site instead of someone else’s” (p 12).

Well that’s all good but how do you get attention online then?

Discussing all the possible ways of promoting websites online would be way out of the scope of this article, this includes advertising and more or less advanced marketing strategies that may cost thousands of pounds. For this article I will concentrate on one promotional strategy called the “pull promotion strategy” as opposed to the “push promotion strategy” (Hutchison 2006, p10). The pull strategy is supposed to ‘create’ a demand for a product. You do this by confronting the consumer with a product that they want, and they then actively seek to obtain that product. This is a strategy used to promote a product directly to the end user, instead of relying on other instances in the distribution channel to do it for you, for example relying on venues to promote a gig with your artist.

As a small online business, RSS can be useful as a pull promotional strategy. As mentioned earlier it’s all about getting attention, and for website promotion it means getting attention from new visitors and for that, you need off-site promotion. Although loyal visitors are good for ad revenue, you want to expand that all the time. There are several methods of using RSS to get new visitors by your site.

1. Submit you feed to RSS directories.

   The first thing to do is to make other websites aware of your content. Submitting you feed to sites like technorati, feedster and syndi8 will make your content visible to potential new visitors. And vitally, you will get links back to your site that Google will find and index you.

2. Publish the full feed

   A thing to consider is to publish the full feed and not just a summary of the article. This will encourage webmaster on other websites to publish your full article including a link back to your site. This will give you even more visibility, and google loves it.

3. Try BlogRush

   BlogRush is still relatively new an untested, but it seems like something worth trying. You basically sign up to a network, where you agree to display a small widget on your website that shows headlines from other blogs and your your headline is then shown across the network on other websites.

4. Word of Mouse

   Encourage people to publish your feed on their website, like I have done with new music strategies (in the side bar). Make them aware of the full url to use or provide a JavaScript version of your feed for easier implementation.

Remember: Content is King!

Promoting your website online is essential, but you don’t get anywhere without having good content that people find useful. The promoting part is just to make people aware of something they didn’t knew existed.

Bibliography

HORSLEY, R. & GAUNTLETT, D. (2004) Web.studies, London New York, Arnold; Distributed in the U.S.A. by Oxford University Press.

HUTCHISON, T. W., MACY, A. & ALLEN, P. (2006) Record label marketing, Burlington, MA, Focal Press.

Filed under: Online Promotion, rss   |  4 Comments
Tags: promotion, rss

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

18Oct07

RSS in it’s newest format (2.0), is short for Really Simple Syndication, but depending on what version you are referring to, RSS can also mean; Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary, not that there are many differences between them.

Technical Specs

RSS is a part of the XML markup (Decker et. al, 2002), which can be thought of in relation to the traditional HTML markup used by web browsers today. XML is just another way of writing information that is supposed to be interpreted by an application, such as a web browser, a feed reader and can carry all sorts of content including music and videos as we know it from podcasts. RSS is as defined by Vossen, (2007, p 48) a format to which:

“users or clients can subscribe to a host of information from the Web, so that obtaining information (e.g., stock tickers, special offers, news, and nowadays often podcasts) can be automated in various ways.”

This is a perfect example of what Tim Berners Lee wanted from The Semantic Web, the ability for computers to understand the data that are out there and available on the web. His ideas (Berner-Lee, 2001) about the semantic web are nicely summed up by Vossen, (2007, p 282)

“The idea of adding more meaning to what can be found on the Web today and to do so in such a way that this information becomes not only machine-readable (as it is already today), but also machine- understandable; today it is only understandable to humans.”

iTunes & Lastfm

A good example of this is iTunes which uses xml feeds to pull podcasts from web sites, although a music file or video only makes sense to us humans (computers doesn’t have ears or eyes), distributing to the content via RSS allows us to send information with it that is understandable by computers. What iTunes understands here is what time the latest podcast was released, if it couldn’t read the date of when the podcast was published it wouldn’t know when to download the next episode.

Another instance where this idea of the semantic web is used, and although it’s not really RSS it’s a great example of what this is all about. Lastfm let’s people download software that send there listening habits to a central database, this lets users compare taste and lets users tag songs, directly from their desktop. As I don’t know how the software works, it seem like some kind of reverse RSS feed. here it is Lastfm pulling the data from the user, and putting straight into it’s database. You could play around with this idea a bit further and in relation to the music business, it could be useful in the way that you could let people send information about their music taste to a company. You could imagine apple using this to extract information from users using iTunes, then when you visited the iTunes store they could like amazon does; show you content based on you listening habits.

The Music Business

In relation to how you could make use of RSS in an online music business, there are several obvious possibilities such as podcasting and news articles from favourite bands etc. Podcasting has the obvious connection to the music business because you can distribute audio and video, but i think there are other possibilities to RSS than just the obvious ones. RSS is all about automating things, and if used in conjunction with other automation processes there are no really limit to the what you can do with RSS. If you as a record label have artist information on your web site, you could include a flickr feed that would show public photos tagged with that bands name on flickr. This can obviously be extended to venues, a venue could include public photos from an event. Same idea applies to services like rsscalendar and localcalendar, both calendar services which let’s you create a calendar with a rss feed for it. You could then create a calendar for each bands and display the calendar on your web site and offer it to fans, so that they always would know what their favourite band where up to.

There are so many things you can do, Yahoo for example have a mapping service where you can parse RSS information to it, and it will be displayed on the map. You have endless possibilities with this service, you could take the calendar RSS feed for an artist and integrate it in a map. You could then integrate that map into your artist’s web site and people would always be able to see where that artist were playing.

YouTube Definition

I know it’s a daunting post

Bibliography:

BERNERS-LEE, T., J. HENDLER, O. LASSILA (2001): The Semantic Web – A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities; Scientific American, Vol. 284, No. 5, May, pp. 35–43.

DECKER, STEFAN AND FRANK VAN HARMELEM, JEEN BROEKSTRA, MICHAEL ERDMANN, DIETER FENSEL, IAN HORROCKS, MICHEL KLEIN, SERGEY MELNIK. The Semantic Web: On the Respective Roles of XML and RDF. Last Update 2002. Available from http://www.ontoknowledge.org/oil/downl/IEEE00.pdf.

HAMMERSLEY, B. (2003) Content syndication with RSS, Beijing Farnham, O’Reilly.

VOSSEN, G. & HAGEMANN, S. (2007) Unleashing Web 2.0 : from concepts to creativity, Amsterdam ; Boston, Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann.

Filed under: rss   |  3 Comments
Tags: feed, rss, Semantic Web

Is Web 2.0 Really What You Mean?

11Oct07

Having written about web 2.0 before I will try to expand a little bit on that with this blogpost. It’s quite hard to find a definition of what Web 2.0 really is, or rather it’s hard to find one that people agree with. The best one I have come across is not really a definition, but it explains the transition between, what presumably was, Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

“While initially content was mostly read from the Web, content is meanwhile more and more written to the Web. This is why some people speak of Web 2.0 as the “read/write Web.” Vossen, G. and S. Hagemann (2007). Unleashing Web 2.0 : from concepts to creativity.

Google Always Gets it Right

I personally share the view of Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google. He believes Web 2.0 being a set of applications for the web. I agree with him on the basis that things like blogs and wikis and even using the web as a platform, as Tim O’Reilly first defined Web 2.0, has been around since the beginning of the web. Only difference being that the technology simply wasn’t there to allow a great deal of interactivity. See Amazon, they have had reviews for years, because they mastered the technology.

I will use this time line created by Jürgen Schiller Garica to demonstrate my point. Weblogs, wikis and communities all dates back to the beginning of the World Wide Web, where it is the more technical things that dominates later on: Social software, AJAX and podcasts.

User-generated content

User-generated content becomes a natural addition to this technology, because you can now with the new applications create an environment for users to use; Myspace, Facebook, Flickr. These are all seen as classic examples of Web 2.0. In contrast to this I don’t see social networking as Web 2.0, I don’t see online communities as Web 2.0, that’s just people using the Web 2.0 environment to satisfy their needs, because now they can. I see a clear distinction where web 2.0 is merely technology based, and social networking and communities as cultural needs people have. Remember it’s not only online we use user-generated content, it is also used on television.

This transition from passive to active use of the web is not an unexpected development. If you look at television as an example, the first television programs were all about sitting and being talked to. Educational TV. That of course soon changed, so that viewers could interact via phone calls and later via texts.

The Semantic Web

In this context I also think that there is a difference between, what people refer to as the Semantic web, and here I will disagree with Adam and claim that RSS is not a Web 2.0 technology but rather a part of the Semantic web. The semantic web dates back to the start of the WWW. Sir Tim Berners-Lee the creator of the WWW expressed thoughts about this when he created the World Wide Web back in 1993.

The semantic web is not based on applications like Web 2.0 is, but rather on the process of communication. This idea where web content can be read and understood not only by humans but also by computers. RSS feeds are an example of this, and as Hammersley, (2003) describes it:

“[RSS] is the basis for the concept known as the Semantic Web, the W3C’s vision of a web of information that computers can understand.”Hammersley, B. (2003). Content syndication with RSS. Beijing Farnham, O’Reilly.

The semantic web is many times what people mean, when they refer to Web 2.0, although there are many takes on this matter.

Filed under: Web 2.0   |  7 Comments
Tags: o'reilly, rss, Semantic Web, Web 2.0

Music Retailing and Distribution

04Oct07

To be honest I can’t remember the last time I went and bought music at a physical music retailer like ASDA, HMV, Virgin Media or any other for that matter. Actually the last time I went to HMV I actually ended up buying something as old fashioned as a hardback copy of a book. It was actually more of an impulse purchase than anything else, I went to get a Christmas present, and if it hadn’t been because it was the day before Christmas, I would probably have bought that season of Desperate Housewives online anyway. – And I wasn’t the only one in that position as it turned out to be sold out anywhere I looked.

This is pretty much the way it always turns out when I do old fashioned shopping, I go out to get something, and gets home with something completely different from what I should have had. – Then I go online to buy what I went out for in the first place.

Online Music Retailers

Buying or obtaining music has become more and more and online experience. Most of the big music retailers sell their music online, either as physical products, digital downloads or both. Buying the physical product like a CD, from HMV is not much different from buying it in one of their stores, you get the actual disc in the actual box with the actual artwork etc. and you basically pay the same price.

Online Distribution

Digital downloads are in complete contrast to this. Here you buy a compressed version of a song and download it to your computer. Now you either burn it out on a CD or transfer it to your mp3 player, you normally get the front cover of the album art work, but no more.

Actually the distribution of music online was started way before the music was sold as digital downloads. Services like Napster and Kazaa was using the peer-to-peer technology to share music. This would enable users to share their music with everyone else around the world. You could buy a CD rip it to your pc and then share it on the internet, free for everyone to download. This is of course illegal and the music business after numerous attempts, not been able to stop this sharing culture. Their counter attack has been, to make their music available online themselves as digital downloads that you can purchase and then download to your computer.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

This resulted in cheaper music because no reproduction costs where necessary and you could distribute music very cheap using digitally compressed formats. However to prevent the music from being illegally redistributed all the songs purchased were protected with “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) which meant that the music had a limit to how many times it could be transferred to another device (hard disk, mp3 player, pc etc.) and a limit to how many times you could burn the song to a CD. – This approach has also so failed to stop the distribution of illegal music online.

When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. Steve Jobs, Apple Inc.

DRM protection has to a big extend been upheld by record labels wanting to secure their income from music sales. But more and more players in the industry are now pushing to get rid of the DRM protection. Retailers like iTunes have the ability, in form of an increasing sale to put pressure on the big record labels to ditch the DRM protection.

Amazon MP3 is an all-MP3, DRM-free catalog of a la carte music from major labels and independent labels, playable on any device, in high-quality audio, at low prices, Bill Carr, Amazon.com

Amazon.com have sold physical music for years, but they are now opening a Digital download store where every single song is DRM free, its even cheaper than the average digital music file you download and the quality is twice as good as the one you get from for example iTunes.

Filed under: Music Online   |  3 Comments
Tags: Distribution, DRM, Mp3, Retail