More from the mailbag:
Dear Ike:
I heard one of our executives asking about our s’s. He just watched a webinar, and said our competitors had our s’s, and was worried about how this would affect our logo. I told him that all of the keyboards in our department still had s’s, and there was no cause for alarm. Still, I am worried because I don’t know about these newfangled technologies, and concerned our rivals might actually have a way to get our s’s. Help!
Andy G., Santa Clara
Andy – don’t worry. All your consonants are belong to us!
Seriously, you need to gently educate your bosses about “RSS“. It means Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way to hide information in your communications so programs and machines can read it better.
Behind the scenes, every bit of text that is a little unusual is ‘marked up’. In the previous sentence, ‘text’ is surrounded by tags that tell your browser to BOLD THIS, ‘unusual’ is told to be rendered with underlines, and so on. Well, the same goes with RSS, except the message is encoded with information that says ‘this is the title,’ ‘this is the content,’ and so on. Now you don’t have to look at the data on a webpage for it to make sense anymore – the message has been set free and is nimble enough to make sense on many platforms. You enter the information one time, and your audience can choose to consume it as a website, or an e-mail, or as a pdf. There are even services that convert an RSS-enabled item into speech!
It’s a great tool for flexibility. It doesn’t require any additional work on your end, and makes your message more convenient for those receiving it. You can use RSS externally, or even internally within your company. And if your using it internally, that would be the only time I’d be concerned with your competitors ‘stealing’ your RSS. Even though RSS is about sharing, you can still lock it down with password protection with a so-called ‘authenticated feed.’
From a different perspective internally, just think of all the ways you could use RSS to pull in data from branch offices and the field. The data comes to you, and because it is internally tagged (using something else called MicroFormats), it can flow into several different applications, databases, and reports instantaneously.
RSS is your friend, indeed. Here are some other resources where you can learn about RSS, and why you need to get on the bandwagon:
Time for one more letter…
Ike Pigott:
Please visit http://canadianpharmmanmax.com for your high-discount low-anxiety V1a6ara and C14l1s enhancement meds.
Sincerly,
Hugeness Q. Cojones, Manila, Phillipines
Thanks for the offer, your Hugeness. Maybe you ought to run that through the spell-checker next time.
RSS allows information to come to you without you going to it.