Making RSS feeds feel pretty and much smarter for marketers
In the late 90’s when I was working in the travel tech industry the idea of XML standard protocol was seen as something of a holy grail. Parsing traveler data between various reservation systems was complicated business especially as legacy and proprietary reservation systems were incompatible and could not communicate with each other without days of screwing around with their database connectivity by expensive engineers.
It was therefore that seamless packaging of different elements of travel near impossible. It wasnt until the early years of this decade that the first online travel booking engine claimed to be able to parse traveler data thru various reservation systems and end up with what we liked to call the Super PNR. It was a true breakthrough in travel technology and disrupted the complete travel industry. It couldn’t have been done without XML.
I was on the co-founder board of a true multimillion dollar travel startup in London during the late 90’s. XML was on our minds too but there was no way that the OPT (the advisory board set up by leaders in the travel industry aiming to set standards in XML for the industry) was going to work as fast as we were ambitious….so we started building a X million dollar travel booking engine with multiple data connections to suppliers all over the world…
THANK GOD it was all over because of a misjudgment in our break-even date, 10 instead of 5 years, meant a lot for a start up in those days (still does now by the way)!
XML and me have usually had a long distance relationship, I usually try to stay away from code in general and it has been very thankful for that most of the time. This was until I read a rather alarming article on one of the Dutch blogs last week.
Apparently 70% of the Dutch population has no idea what RSS is and not to mention XML/XSL of course. I thought what a pity, all these people cannot enjoy the same organized online lifestyle as me and more worrying, aren’t we missing lots of marketing opportunities here!? Of course, to this 70% the internet must still seem a daunting mess with only perhaps the likes of Google or Yahoo to help them find their ways through the rubble of internet past to internet future, they are missing out on finding out where the true power of the internet lies. However since we, who are in on the RSS secret aren’t being paid to tell anyone else, that’s where the story ends..
Or is it? In a rather benevolent streak I figured out a very simple solution for all these people and you may find it correctly displayed in the right side bar of this page below the links (if you don’t your browser probably has a problem with the iframe).
So what is it? Basically it’s an RSS feed set into an iframe. If you right-click anywhere in the block you will see the address in the properties as http://www.dolcevia.com/artman/publish/rssadfeed.xml
If you follow this link you will end up at a page which frankly looks very much the same as this block. However if you view the source of this file it should be very clear to you that this is just another basic RSS file written in XML.
It took me all of two days to get it all figured out but I am quite proud of the results and of its potential. The people who did answer they knew of RSS in the above Dutch survey thought it very much belonged to the geeky grey area of internet.
The appearance of the RSS feeds seem to be the most intimidating of all. This is what gave me the incentive to get onto the coding stool and produce the NEW and FRIENDLY RSS feed!
I experimented with many sizes and formats but I especially like the banner sized ones. Now really anyone can start there own ad network or just use them as a smart way to exchange or syndicate content whilst branding them in your own special interface!
The skyscaper banner feed on the right is a feed from one of my Dutch community websites Dolcevia.com. So there you have your daily Italian recipe courtesy of me!
