Get Your Content Out There – Feeds

Brian just posted something the other day about RSS, and why it’s good. Let’s take a step back, what is a feed?

Think of it this way, back in 2001 when you wanted to see if your favorite pages had updated you’d have to go to each one of them to check. For the most part, that is not true today, this is because of feeds.

Think of it this way, when the Associated Press publishes a new piece they send it out to every news source that has subscribed to their newsfeed. The news organizations that subscribe to it don’t have to call the AP every 15 minutes and ask if there’s anything new happening; the AP sends the new news to them.

That is a feed.

The best way to get someone to read something is to send what you want to read to them. Magazines do it, the IRS does it, your county does for jury duty – and you do it already (your prayer letters). Imagine if you just set your newsletters outside your house each month and asked your partners to come bye and pick them up so they can pray for you… yeah, I know, stupid.

You probably already use feeds. Twitter, podcasts, email updates from websites, etc., these are all examples of feeds or are services that use feeds to run them.

That orange symbol up there, that symbol says, “Hey! Subscribe to me!” If you notice, it’s in at least two locations on our CruBlogging (even more if you are using Firefox or Chrome). If you click on them or the place on our sidebar that says “Entries RSS” you’ll be taken to a page to tell your browser how you want to subscribe to us. Let me suggest Google Reader. (Make sure you look at the Google Reader tour too.)

Tagged as: feeds, google reader, podcasts, rss