Posts Tagged ‘RSS’
Press Releases & RSS – Will they ever mix?
Posted by Richard in Media Monday, 12 December o 20:49 3 Comments
This week the Syndicate conference is being held in San Francisco. One of the themes is Syndicated Public Relations, which according to the show press release: “Shows how leading PR pros are using blogs, podcasting, RSS, and a new crop of search and tracking tools to build relationships with a new group of influencers while finding innovative ways to stay in touch with established target audiences and communities of interest.”
What’s amusing is how hard it is to find RSS feeds of press releases from either high tech vendors or high tech online media. I’ve been trying to aggregate the press releases from several high tech vendors only to find that in most cases these RSS feeds don’t exist. Take IDG for example. I’m picking on IDG since their subsidiary, IDG World Expo, is running the Syndicate conference. Here is an organization made up of some of the most popular high tech publications, such as ComputerWorld, MacWorld, InfoWorld, … all with an online component. Many of the publications have scores of editorial based RSS feeds, but just try and find an RSS feed of their press releases. As far as I can tell IDC is the only IDG company that provides their press releases as RSS. By the way it’s not just IDG, check out CNET and JupiterMedia — both have long pages of RSS feeds to choose from, but none for their own press releases.
I’ve always found it extremely amusing that high tech media companies push the importance of RSS to syndicate their editorial, while abandoning the concept from their own marketing. While at OSDN we implemented RSS feeds for press releases — now it seems they’ve gone all the way back to availability in pdf format only.
Let’s hope this conference can start to educate and explain how RSS can be an effective marketing and PR tool. Let’s also hope that the public relations teams of media companies will pave the way, by using RSS feeds to get their own PR and marketing messages delivered more ubiquitously.
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Questioning the Slashdot Effect — Getting to the Why not the What
Business Week Online’s article Less Impact from the Slashdot Effect leaps to conclusions about why the Slashdot Effect has weakened over the last 12 months. While I do not necessarily question an overall decline in the percentage of traffic that other tech news sites attribute to Slashdot, I do take issue with what appears to be lazy journalism in citing causes for the decline.
The article asserts that the number of news sites Slashdot is linking to has skyrocketed. And that has reduced the impact Slashdot can make on each individual site’s traffic. I decided to do a little investigating.
For example, compare the number of original stories and links embedded in them on a random day over the last three years. I picked the last Tuesday of February — February 22 2005, February 24 2004 and February 25 2003. BTW: On Slashdot it’s really easy to look at any day in history by using the ?issue=yyyymmdd url parameter. For example, February 22 2005 is http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20050222.
2003: 17 stories on the index page with 38 links
2004: 22 stories on the index page with 48 links
2005: 22 stories on the index page with 51 links
The difference between 2004 and 2005 is nominal where is the “skyrocket”? Three additional links on a given day cannot cause a radical decline in The Slashdot Effect.
The article also suggests that look alike sites are lessening the Slashdot Effect. This means that sites such as geek.com and gizmodo.com are diluting the Slashdot Effect. This is ridiculous. The average number of comments per story on geek.com is less than 25. Compare that to 450 comments per article on Slashdot. The lack of community focus on these competing sites means they are too weak to either generate their own Slashdot Effect or too insignificant to dilute Slashdot’s.
Finally, the article also suggests that the growing number of tech news sites is another reason that the Slashdot Effect is diminishing. I fail to see the logic here. The sheer growth of Slashdot unique visitors and page views negates this theory.
If there is, in fact, a decline in the Slashdot Effect aside from anecdotal evidence, there were no plausible reasons explored in the article. Perhaps, Slashdot has grown beyond its original tech editorial focus and is linking more frequently to sites beyond the conventional high tech list. Perhaps, the proliferation of links to CNET and other tech sites have, over time, caused readers to visit those sites as part of their normal daily reading habits. Perhaps, the visitors to Slashdot are becoming increasingly focused on the community comments themselves rather than the news links. Or perhaps, more and more visitors to Slashdot have already linked to the source from their RSS news and blogs reader.
At a minimum, I would hope that an interested journalist or anthropologist will take a closer look at Slashdot to find out if there is a correlation between its increasing page views and visitors and declining traffic referrals. My sense is that we may be seeing the evolution of this worldwide community and its dynamics, rather than simple advertising-mentality trend lines.
Disclaimer: The opinions in this Weblog post are my own. I am no longer associated with Slashdot, OSTG or VA Software.
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