There isn’t much that’s sacred from spam and commercials these days, and it looks as though there is one less safe zone in the works. Internet phone and wireless calls are now considering selling in call advertising. This means that you’ll now be able to listen to a brief advertisement while waiting for the company to connect your call.

Opt-in?
The service will allegedly be opt-in with credits offered for participating callers that will help to offset phone bills. But even if the service is opt-in initially, it is highly likely that these short ads are a vision of what is to come. Internet phones are getting more popular and advertisers are working every way they can to reach customers. If it means annoying you while making you wait to talk to Grandma just to get a line of marketing in, that’s what they’ll do. After all, there is a great deal of money involved for companies and advertisers.

Targeted Ads
The best part, of the worst depending on how you look at it, is that the ads you’re likely to be hearing will be targeted directly to you. Much in the way Google targets ads to related content, your phone advertisements will be targeted to the types of phone calls you make. For example, if you frequently call New York, you may be privileged to enjoy commercials for new flights to New York or New York accommodations.

A Cutting Edge Industry
In call advertising is a relatively new field, but it is already being used by at least one internet phone service and has been a standard practice on calling cards for some time. When a calling card user uses a card to call friends or family in another country, they are subjected to advertisements through a company called VoodooVox.

VoodooVox runs on approximately thirty percent of calling cards and had revenues of $4 million dollars in 2007. While that number may not be overwhelming, the revenues from in call advertising in 2008 are expected to grow ten times over. VoodooVox and others already working to establish the in call advertising practices are well situated to take home a substantial part of the revenue from their brainstorm.

Opt-Out?
So what are the phone customers to do? While some may tolerate commercials and advertisements better than others, nobody wants to listen to ads while trying to have a personal phone conversation. The ads may be opt-in initially, but that is almost guaranteed to change over time.

Industry personnel are taking potential customer issues seriously. There is a great deal of concern over privacy and other issues relating to sharing of information gathered from the phones. There is also discussion about customer retention. Customers who are intolerant of even the shortest, least intrusive ad will leave the company if there is not a way to stop the ads.

Even if the ads can be turned off, the customers may still leave on principle. One thing is certain – if a customer doesn’t want to listen to the ads, he’ll just find another way to make a phone call – perhaps off the computer or with another company. In call ads are just another means for phone companies to compete.

We placed RSS feeds on our site, but it seems we get alot of advertising on it. I dont really want that. Is there a way to block certain sites rss feed if you use a general RSS feed say from yahoo or something like that?

I do like yahoo because of the Varity, but i dont always like certain stories from websites.

The problem with most RSS marketing plans is that the marketer doesn't really go beyond providing a simple RSS feed for all of his online news or his blog. But since you've been reading this column for a while now you know for a fact that RSS offers so much more.

To get started the right way you need to correctly plan your RSS Marketing strategy, starting by deciding how you are going to deliver your RSS content.

The right way to go, even if you're only starting out with a simple RSS strategy, is to provide individual RSS feeds for:

your individual target audiences,
your different types of content and
even your different content topics.
Think of this as a consequtive list of how to develop your RSS strategy.

TARGET AUDIENCES

Start by listing the target audiences you want to deliver your content to via RSS. Each of your audiences has different content needs, resulting in different groups of RSS feeds that need to be created for these target audiences. One group for the media, the other for your employees, the other for the general public, the other for your existing customers and so on. You can even go further and divide your master groups in sub-groups, based on their prevailing interests.

CONTENT TYPES

Now consider the different types of content you want to deliver to these audiences. For example your latest news, your blog posts, your how-to articles, your press releases, your podcasts, the latest posts from your forums, direct communications messages and so on. In most cases these types of content don't mix well together. If someone wants to receive your blog updates, which are full of your company representatives' personal opinions and commentary, they don't want to receive your corporate-speak press releases.

If someone is interested in what's happening in your forum and what the latest forum posts are, they don't want to receive your how-to articles in the same RSS feed, simply because these two types of content are so much different. And so on. Essentially, you will need to provide separate feeds for each of the different content types, and you will need to determine what content types you wish to deliver to each of your target audience groups and sub-groups.

CONTENT TOPICS

Finally take a look at each individual content type for each individual target audience and further break that down by content topic, if needed. And if you're trying to cover many different topics for each content type, you will need to provide different RSS feeds for these different topics, because, again, people interested in topic A are not neccessarily also interested in topic B.

While this may sound complicated, it's really simple once you start doing it.

The point is, this is about giving your subscribers choice of what they subscribe to. Instead of forcing them to subscribe to everything, allow them to subscribe to only what they want and need.

Quite simple, right?

Just remember that you should only break this down as far as it makes sense, keeping in mind the actual content that your target audiences want from you.

Depending on your business, you just might only need to communicate with one target audience, deliver only one content type and deliver only one content topic for that target audience.

DECIDE HOW YOU ARE GOING TO DELIVER THIS CONTENT

Once you have your RSS content mapped-out, you need to consider how you are going to make this content available to your target audiences. This is especially important since it's going to influence the tools you need to get started with RSS publishing

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL RSS FEEDS

This is about as standard as it gets --- publishing one RSS feed to meet the needs of all of your target audiences at once or publishing multiple topical RSS feeds, which always remain the same. The easiest to do, can be done with any RSS publishing tool on the market

CUSTOMIZABLE RSS FEEDS

The more and more complex you get with the different feeds you're offering, the more difficult it is for your visitors to select what exactly they want, simply because an individual subscriber might be interested in 10 of your 100 feeds, but he doesn't want to be subscribed to that many feeds by your company.

In this case the best way to go is to also offer your visitors the opportunity to customize your RSS feed they decide exactly what content type and content topics they want to receive in one or a few RSS feeds they'll be subscribing from you.

The opportunities here are quite endless, as you can allow them to customize their feeds based on topics, content types, authors and more.

If this is the way you need to go because you are offering so much content via your RSS feeds that it makes it difficult for someone to subscribe to only one or a few feeds from you, you will need your RSS publishing solution to support feed customization.

SEARCH-BASED RSS FEEDS

Search-based RSS feeds are a subset of customizable RSS feeds, and they work just like a search engine. You type in a certain keyword or keyword combinations and the search engine gives you the most relevant or the latest results for that keyword combination.

You can do the same with RSS, allowing your visitors to enter specific keywords and then get the content from you only based on those keywords.

PERSONALIZED RSS FEEDS

Giving users the choice to customize the content they are receiving from you is one thing, but certain content may actually demand you to personalize the feed using your subscribers personal information.

The most basic variation, used to lift response, is addressing your subscribers by name or using other data about the customer from your database, such as his address, previous purchases etc.

In other cases a bank might want to deliver information directly relating to your bank account, directly via RSS, such as your latest credit card transactions, and so on.

RSS FEEDS WITH CONTENT TARGETING

Now imagine that you want to create individualized campaigns to individual subscribers, based on the information you already have in your database about their activities, demographics and so on, for example to send a promotion for product A only to those subscribers that might be most interested in product A.

In this case you will need an RSS solution that can pull this data from your database and then segment your subscribers based on the actual data.

AUTORESPONDER RSS FEEDS

Since their introduction, e-mail autoresponders have become a relatively mainstream internet direct marketing tool, although they haven't really made their way to the world of public relations.

The concept is simple a certain action by your visitors on your website triggers a sequence of e-mail messages, delivered to that visitor, provided you have his e-mail address, over a period of several days.

Direct marketers use this to automatically communicate with the prospect after a certain action, trying to get him to do what they want.

The most common application is offering your visitors a free report, delivered to them via e-mail. After subscribing they start receiving consequtive parts of the report day after day or a every few days, receiving both new information as well as being exposed to the marketer's promotional message.

Other applications include autoresponder messages in relation to transactional e-mail:

Subscribe to a free e-mail newsletter. The first autoresponder message thanks you for the subscription and also gives you access to one of the newsletter issues. A couple of days later, while you're still "hot as a lead", you receive another e-mail, pertaining to the newsletter topic, giving you more advice or information on the topic and trying achieve a sales conversion. And so on.
Complete a webstore order. The first message thanks you for the purchase and recommends an additional product at a lower price. The second message tells you more about the product you purchased. The third messages makes a special additional purchase offer. The fourths message gives you some great additional tips, and so on.
Start an online order, but don't finish it. The first message reminds you that there are still products in your shopping cart. The second message reminds you again, giving you added inscentive to complete the order. And so on
The opportunities are practically limitless, but you get the picture.

Now simply transform this concept into the realm of RSS.

Someone subscribes to your RSS feed. The first couple of content items, spread-out through the first week, serve as a series of welcome messages giving the new subscriber access to your top content and inviting him to actively participate. Your latest feed updates come through as well, but your new subscriber also gets the extra treatment (content) in the same feed.

And now apply this to anything you're doing with RSS, where it makes sense to follow-up with additional information to your new subscribers once they subscribe, of course depending on the feed topic and target audience.

Very few RSS tools today offer autoresponder capabilities, but some do.

TO RECAP

Think of your RSS publishing strategy and try to establish which of the these publishing models your RSS publishing tool should support:

Topical or Target Audience Oriented RSS Feeds
Customizable RSS Feeds
Search-Based RSS Feeds
Personalized RSS Feeds
RSS Feeds With Content Targeting
Autoresponder RSS Feeds

The future of aggregators is, in part, about *importance*. Items most important to you should bubble to the top, and items less important should sink to the bottom or just get deleted.

This isn't a function of one specific feature but of a group of features -- smart lists, filters, scriptability, statistics, ratings, searching, and so on -- that are important even if there were no such as thing as ads in RSS/Atom.

I don't expect to get asked for ad-blocking-specific features, since I don't think ad-blocking-specific features will be needed. These already-existing and already-planned features will be highly effective at ad-blocking.

Here's a very simple example of something you can do right now with the many aggregators that let you use a custom style sheet for displaying news items. Say a feed includes graphical ads from some service. You could add a line to your style sheet that says that all graphics from that domain should not be displayed. This feature -- custom style sheets -- doesn't exist to block ads, but it can easily be used to block ads.

The whole point of aggregators is about user control and smarts. Ad blocking is, and will be, just a side effect.

I don't think that ads in RSS are a good idea, anyway. Here's why:

1. If you have a feed with summaries, and the summaries are compelling enough to cause me to go read the full entry on the site -- then I'll actually go to the site and see the ads there. If you don't have a feed, I may *never* go to your site. Even with full-content feeds I often open pages in my browser -- and, again, I end up seeing the ads.

2. Using RSS/Atom feeds increases your readership among webloggers. A weblogger will then link to stories at your site rather than stories at sites that don't have feeds. So feeds can help drive traffic to your site. Including ads in your feed increases the likelihood that people will unsubscribe, and you'll miss out on this effect.

I suspect that people link to the New York Times far more often than they link to CNN, since CNN doesn't have feeds. And I think this is significant. As a feed provider, your goal should be to get people to *link* to your pages: *that's* how you build traffic and ad views.

I dunno if my approach is broadly applicable, but here's how I do things:

* I use RSS for pretty much everything these days... blogs, system status reports, tracking a Gmail account, forum participation, and so on. So I've got a few hundred "physical" subscriptions.

* I use JournURL's aggregator to feed the app on my desktop (Newzcrawler)... the server side is essentially a pre-aggregator, bundling up feeds that I don't want to track individually.

* I use Newzcrawler's search channels pretty much constantly. They scan any items in the database that meet various conditions and pull them out for me. For example, there's a forum where my primary contributions are XML- or RSS-related... so while I subscribe to the forum's feed, I only read it via a search channel that's watching for "XML" or "RSS" in thread titles or bodies.

* I use feeds from PubSub, Feedster, etc. to watch for mentions of me or my work.

* I keep my feeds in Newzcrawler organized in a folder structure. The stuff I check frequently (the NYT, for example) goes into a "Favorites" folder that's at the top of the list. Referrer feeds and other admin-type stuff go into another folder. Entertainment-oriented feeds go into a folder that I check once a day or so. And so on.

* Newzcrawler allows me to flag items for later review, and I use that capability a lot. Particularly when dealing with partial-content feeds... if the server's down the first time I try to click-through to read the entire thing, I just flag it and come back later.

* This is probably starting to sound like a Newzcrawler ad, but I also make extensive use of its support for the wfw:commentRss extension. On blogs with per-post comment feeds, NC lets me subscribe to a post's comments with one click. Much, much better than email subscriptions... hint, hint. :D

Oh, and Lee, I know I owe you an email...

I guess I'm a contrarian, but last year I started trying to get more efficient with my RSS reading and found the best way to get the results I wanted was to stop using RSS almost entirely.

I'll be curious how you evolve your strategies and what others say, but I personally work from the "use case" of: I can only savor so much information at a time and I'd rather have less info in a less mechanical / more creative experience than more info in a more mechanical / less creative experience.

I'll be posting more about this in a month or so (I think), but, basically, I don't find that the mechanical time / space boundaries RSS introduces (or represents) in information corresponds with the boundaries I want / need.

(That said, RSS has a lot of right ideas--I think what I want will have a lot of similarities with RSS. fyi, see my post on what I call the RSS Combo Meal.)

A few things I do:

a) remind myself to periodically look at feeds which are piled with unread messages. Is it really necessary to remain subscribed? Am I subscribed just because I "should" be reading it? And then whittle mercilessly :)

b) make use of tabbed browsing: I skim the feeds, middle click the interesting looking items to open in new tabs, then read them separately. I find I get through much more that way.

c) handle to_reads: I make liberal use of printing items which I keep in a "to read" folder-- it's amazing how much I can get through while offline.

d) strip repetition-- I periodically remove one or the other of the blogs which feature A-listers primarily talking about each other... I only need one half (or third, whatever) of the echo chamber

e) I'm experimenting with rolling multiple feeds that I like to skim occasionally into one large feed...

I use RSS very avidly these days. I don't really like the online Newsgator interface because it doesn't give me enough organization and filtering among and between my subscriptions. I use Shrook for the Mac and like it because it has an Itunes-like interface with four columns. I have organized all my feeds into folders and I start my day by checking feeds related to my company and work. I have a few "RSS radars" set up that track key words (like my name) and other topics of interest. I then go on to check support forums for the blogging software we are using and my mac forums. Then I go to my elearning folder (where Common Craft resides). I have folders for topics like RSS, Search, and Social Networking. Then I have a set of personal blogs I read on and off. I would say I check this folder once a week at most. I also track my Netflix queue and new releases via RSS. I have a news folder that has Wired, WSJ, Washington Post, and a few other publications, but I rarely read any of these feeds. They have gotten pushed down too far in terms of priority.

I use Bloglines, and I have a number of categories (News, Tech, Personal, etc.) for my feeds, currently at 255 (I get about 10 new feeds a week). The boundaries between the categories/folders are a little fuzzy, and sometimes I classify a feed into one and later move it into another, but the key is that I use the categories to read. That is, I'll read all the new posts in News, then maybe in Culture (the fuzziest of them all), etc. This way, I rarely have more that about 75 items to check, and most of them get skimmed. The system is starting to reach it's breaking point, so I've either got to unsubscribe from a bunch or find a way to improve the strategy, but up until now it's worked really well for me.

I also have a many feeds (around 70 to 80) but I use Feed Demon. I know it's not free ($30) but it worth it. You can create watches that look for specific keywords in news items as they're downloaded.

For example, I've created a watch that looks for the words "desktop search, filehand, google desktop, copernic, etc.." then every news item containing those words will be stored in the specified watch.

It's very useful if you subscribe to hundreds of channels that you may not want to read regularly, yet always find out when one of them has an item that's of interest.

I like the idea of only reading RSS from those who you have met. A lot. I am instantly thinking it is rather limiting, but find that most things really kick off after face to face contact.

For me, anyway, but then I'm kind of odd in that I have a thing about the much heralded social software as I believe that the 'paradigm' (sorry) is being set by very sociable and confident people, and I would debate what proportion of society they really are...

I subscribe to a lot of feeds. I use FeedDemon, download before my ferry commute home starts, and I go through the feed *quickly*. I figure out how to handle each item: delete, link, read later, blog, email. I put it in an appropriate folder and then handle them when I get home.

Hi, lee. re: becoming a better RSS reader ... Are you aware of Lektora ? (www,lektora.com)

Has Tris told you about it, or perhaps you've tried it. It seems the most intuitive, and *newspaper-like* of all the aggregators/readers I've tried, and we're doing a lot of work to integrate it with Qumana