RSS Tutorial

Promote RSS Feeds

Summary

Promote your RSS feed.

Use RSS to propagate content to the Internet.
Progress on Making RSS Real-Time
Send your RSS Feed to Twitter.
Send your RSS Feed to social sites like FaceBook and MySpace
Register your RSS Feed on RSS Directories.

RSS Feeds provide a great opportunity to promote your website or blog.

Detail

RSS Provides the Method to write it once and have it propagate over the Internet.

RSS in Real-Time.

One of the major concerns about RSS is that it is not real-time. RSS can be used to move content from a blog to social media sites, other websites, and RSS feed readers, but there is a delay which can be up to an hour. In this time of the real-time web, that seems too long.

There are several solutions being implemented. The solution is to change RSS from a "pull" to a "push" technology.

RSS feed readers now poll every hour or so to see if there are updates. That is a "pull" technology.
The new technology is a "push" technology which notifies the RSS feed reader when there is an update.

In general, the protocol is called a Publish / Subscribe model, usually abbreviated as PubSub.

Google is implementing a solution called PubSubHubBub
Dave Winer and others are implementing a solution call rssCloud.

The Story of PubSubHubbub and rssCloud

RSS is great. That said, it isn't real-time. With the advent of Twitter, people are now beginning to wonder why RSS needs to poll every hour. Why can't we have the immediacy of Twitter in RSS. Time for a history lesson.

Comparing PubSubHubbub and rssCloud

I thought I'd prepare a blog entry describing the differences between PubSubHubbub and rssCloud. Both protocols are classic publish and subscribe.

Publishers have a relationship with a hub.
Clients subscribe to a hub.
Publishers send updates to the hub.
The hub pushes notifications out to the Clients.

Rebooting the RSS cloud by Dave Winer

In the early days of RSS, we had the idea that instantaneous updates would be the next step. That was 2001. It took a little longer than we thought, but now with "realtime" as the Next Big Thing, it's time to reboot all that stuff.

Welcome to the demo PubSubHubbub reference Hub server! - by Google

PubSubHubbub is a simple, open, web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol.

Send your RSS Feed to Twitter using Twitter Feed.

Create a Twitter Account.
Go to Twitter Feed and register your RSS Feed.
Each RSS Feed Item will create a Tweet with a link to the item.
Only the first 140 characters will be used which includes the shortened URL.

Send your RSS Feed to social sites like FaceBook and MySpace.

Importing an RSS Feed to Your Facebook Page: I'm not sure who's idea it was to make importing an RSS feed into your Facebook page such a challenge, but it shouldn't be this painful. You'd think it would be possible to go to your page, check-out your settings and add your RSS feed URL to a field and save it. Not so quick.
MyFeedSync for MySpace.: This service allows you to pipe in any RSS feed directly into your MySpace activity stream.