As Dick Costolo, CEO FeedBurner (a US business which provides distribution tools and support for publishers and other content providers) describes it, “technology now allows you to receive a newspaper totally customised for you, based on your interests."
So it seems the age of your own personal newspaper carrying only the content you want, is now here. And whilst it is not quite a mass market medium in Australia just yet, if the US is anything to go by, it’s not far off.
New RSS (Real Simple Syndication) technology allows people to identify subjects and receive only the content they're interested in without requiring they visit websites. And because it is available exclusively on an opt-in basis, there is no risk of spam.
Programs that already exist to enable users to identify and subscribe to available content include Bloglines, MyYahoo! and Newsgator. A number of additional services, such as Memeorandum.com, are also being created to provide personalised aggregation of content in specific categories.
Right now FeedBurner is delivering an average 11 million subscriptions per day, up from 250,000 subscriptions just one-year ago (a "subscription" is described as a feed delivered via an RSS reader to an individual subscriber).
Importantly, RSS continues to evolve and become continually more sophisticated with metrics available to advertisers and commercial publishers. Whilst there are not yet capabilities for flash ads and other rich media types, month-to-month ad growth is quoted as being around 20 percent compound.
Which means there is a whole new world out there waiting for us.
If you would like to talk further about how we can help integrate your traditional marketing activity with the new world of opportunity which exists, simply email
future@synchromesh.com.au.