Is An RSS Feed Important Anymore?

Goolge has started transitioning users from Feedburner to its own brand of RSS delivery. After I completed the transition I reviewed the different RSS feeds that are being distributed through Feedburner, and I started to wonder if RSS feeds actually have any value individually.

My reason to question this is I have FriendFeed consuming all of my blogs RSS feeds, my Twitter Feed, my Flickr feed and many other. In essence I am posting all of my content in one location which doesn't require you to subscribe to my individual feeds, only one FriendFeed. So my question is, are RSS feeds becoming a means to display multiple streams of content in a single location, which can also provide a single RSS feed to consume if someone chooses too?

I know RSS has value, but I'm wondering if it has the same value today as it did a year ago. Are you subscribing to as many individual feeds as you have in the past or are you letting social networks help give you the streams you are most interested in?

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Mash Your RSS With Yahoo! Pipes

Over the past several months I've started writing blog posts for sites other than my own. This is pretty cool, and I want a way to capture all of my posts in an RSS feed that I can display on my main site. This required some mashing of RSS feeds. Enter Yahoo! Pipes.

I've used pipes before but it had been a while. I fire the interface back up and it looks slicker with a more intuitive interface.

I started by adding several feeds this little widget. Plug in the feed URL and you now have a link.



Next I created a filter limiting the posts in the feed to a specific word. No even if I post on someones blog, I can filter out all but my posts. The cool thing here is the filter reads all the possible properties of the RSS feed and makes them available in a drop down. So you could filter on the Author, the date, category or any number of other properties.



And finally I wanted the latest posts at the top so I created a sort pattern using this little widget.



Once I have all of this ready to go I get a sample of what the output will look like so I can see if my filter is working correctly. If not I can go back and make changes. There is a refresh button that lets you see a new output each time yo make changes.



The end result is a nifty looking widget layout of the whole process.



A couple of cool features are the ability to share your public pipes, clone someones public pipes and then modify for your use. At the moment its all free, which is cool. Draw back, there is no SEO for using the type of feed. So I wouldn't recommend it for your blogs main RSS feed.

If you are looking for a way to mashup several RSS feeds, Yahoo! Pipes is a great tool.

What services do you use to mash your RSS?

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Moving my feeds to a Life Stream

Just like Steve Rubel, I've been creating a Life Stream. It's actually more like a big bucket that collected all the various RSS feeds where I submit content. This includes Flickr, my blog, Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us. I have others, such as blip.tv, but I'm not sure I include them all.

I want to be part of all the really cool social networks, but I also wanted to give everyone who cares a place to get all of my various posts. Thanks to Tumblr and Feed Burner, I've pretty much solved the problem.

The only real drawback is Tumblr doesn't allow for comments. I'm ok with this because Tumblr's not really an interactive tool it's a Super Aggregator. If you want to comment on my pictures, click through to them. If you want to comment on my latest blog post, click through to it.

Tumblr also provides a mobile version of your site. If you go to www.thomallen.com/mobile on your PDA browser you get to see a mobile friendly version. I can also publish to my Tumblr with my mobile device. Very cool.

Now I have one RSS feed, but the ability to send people where they want to go. Steve mentions using Tumblr for a specific feed or subdomains. For example, you could go subscribe just to my Flickr photos at photos.thomallen.com. This would point to my Tumblr that just displays the photos. You could do this for Twitter or any other number of sites that publishes its own feed.

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Put Your RSS Feed Above The Fold

There is an old media phrase "above the fold", basically meaning any material that is printed at the top of the paper. This is the most read and usually the most important news in the paper. Your website/weblog has a fold too. It's the bottom of a visitors screen, or somewhere near there. Your most important links and content should be above the bottom of the screen.

It may be just me but one of the first things I look for when I am visiting a site is the RSS link. If I think a site is one I want to continue reading after I leave I add them to a my RSS reader. But I hate having to hunt for it. Everyone who writes a blog wants return visitors. The most common way to do this is provide an RSS feed. But more importantly is that you make it as prominent as possible. Most readers look for an icon like this.

RSS feeds are important and I'm not going to get into the mechanics of RSS because it's been written about thousands of time. But help your readers out. Encourage them to subscribe.

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