Forrester's new RSS feeds

Just a quick note to let you know about Forrester's new RSS feeds. Previously, we had three feeds (which are still available): All of our research, just IT-oriented research, and just business-oriented strategy research.

Users now can create their own customized feeds, based not only on specific, pre-determined categories but also by keywords (so you can choose a technology, company name, or even analyst). The benefit: You'll get exactly what you want in your RSS feed.

I think this is the future of RSS feeds -- instead of subscribing to multiple feeds from the same company (for example, NYTimes.com has a half dozen feeds I'd like to subscribe to, but the content often overlaps and duplicates) I'd have a single feed that I can customize. Apple has a great iTunes Music Store customized RSS feed generator and VMWare's news feed (provided by SimpleFeed) combines different types of content together into one feed.

One thing to watch: each of these feeds could be potentially picked up by feed search engines like Bloglines. One solution is the proposed "no index" flag that was proposed at a RSS roundtable last December.  This will become a bigger and bigger issue as marketing services providers like Silverpop bring along their email marketing clients into the RSS world. In a recent discussion with Silverpop, they made the wise suggestion that marketers should start with delivering individualized feeds from the start, even if those feeds all contain the same information. The rationale is you can actually track and measure individual feeds, an approach advocated by Syndicate IQ.

If you have ideas or examples of customized RSS feeds, please send them along to me or post as a comment below.

Comments

[Jim Cahill]

Charlene, Congratulations on the new RSS feeds!

There has been a great recent conversation on pre-aggregated RSS feeds versus lots of individual RSS feeds. Emerson is doing a similar approach in some of their RSS feeds with Forrester, which I discussed at: http://www.emersonprocessxperts.com/archives/2006/03/moving_to_more.html

Take it easy, Jim

[Erik]

Charlene,

Honda has a very nice system that creates a custom feed URL based on checked options. I subscribe to the whole thing, so I'm not sure about overlap or how the articles are tagged.

See the right column at
http://corporate.honda.com/press/list.aspx

-erik

[Ezra Ball]

I think the search-results-as-rss-feeds that MSN Search, Google News search, and Yahoo! News search are great RSS customizations. I'd personally love to see all search engines incorporate this feature (and, honestly, it should be as easy for them to generate RSS as it is to generate HTML).

I'm not too impressed with VMWare's implementation that you point out above, because I think their categories are too fuzzy to understand up front. How do I know what I would get if I signed up for "solutions"? What is the difference between "Articles", "Technical Information", and "VMWare Products"? There's not really even a way to preview past bits of content for each category, so I can't even deduce that. Since RSS brings everything to you, the cost of ignoring stuff you're not interested in is low, which is one of the reasons RSS works.

Now, a use of custom RSS that I *wish* the software vendors I work with would adopt is providing a feed that gives notifications of upgrades and patches for only the products I use. None of the vendors I work with even send emails about patches, because it's not really worth it to them; I don't check their sites every week, because it's not worth it to me. But I really do need to know when patches are available.

[Bruce Winter]

Could not get Media feed????

Bloglines

No feeds were found. Please verify that the website publishes an RSS feed.
Home > Subscribe

avascript:pop_window( '/RSS/confirmation_nonuser_popup','Media_amp_Entertainment',500,650,28)

[Paul Rooney]

Hi

One of my favourite feeds is from the Jurys Doyle Group - http://www.jurysdoyle.com/

Feeds are available at http://feeds.nooked.com/JurysDoyle

I un-subscribed from the email list once I could track on a per hotel basis via RSS

Paul