The recently released John Kerry for President Newsreader brings RSS technology one step closer to the mainstream; most users don't even know that RSS is working behind the scenes.

Regardless of your party affiliation, this newsreader is a great way to keep up to date with the latest news from the Kerry campaign.  And more importantly, it’s a demonstration of a new, user-friendly, spam-proof technology for delivering timely, branded information on any subject matter.  It happens to be based on RSS, but mainstream users need not think about that.

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The nature of this alliance emerged based on a Weblog post I did about a year ago.

Every now and then an article comes along and you read it and think, wow – that is so well written you can’t think of a thing to add; not a thought to contribute. I felt that way about Jon Udell’s Strategic Developer column ‘Push Me, Pull You’ [Infoworld 05.17.04, Pg 37]. So this entry is likely to be short.

“With RSS, control resides with the recipient and permission is a property of the medium.” – Jon Udell

This is an important distinction; one that encourages email marketing firms to guide their clients concerning matters of trust if they are going to leverage RSS for their business objectives. I think marketing departments and email marketing firms have gotten the impression that RSS is a wholesale replacement for email marketing. In a limited and narrow sense that may be the case, but in the broader context, RSS provides me with significantly more control. I now have the ability to turn on [or off] any channel of information from any company, about any subject. And therein lies my opportunity to contribute a thought about Jon’s article.

I remember growing up in the 1960’s when there were three television networks to choose from. As an avid television consumer, I was forced to take what they served and when they served it. Today I have TiVo. I also have RSS. Control has dramatically shifted to me. This forces content providers to carefully consider my tastes and interest when packaging information. It also explains why we have a Golf Channel, a Fish Channel, Pay-Per-View, and CNN. The atomization of content occurred in television years ago because technology provided greater opportunity for choice. RSS has achieved a similar capability for Internet information.

I recently had a conversation with a customer that wants to create a collection of RSS feeds that would hopefully attract lots of feed consumers to look at only information about their company. It would contain only their Web site information, white papers, and many aspects about their business. While there is good benefit in providing feeds like this, a narrow diet of information of this nature is likely to attract existing customers and perhaps a few competitors. If the RSS objective is to leverage it for marketing purposes, feeds should include a balanced diet of information.

Imagine Verity providing an RSS feed that contains a wide array of information about enterprise search including recent news stories, events, and articles. This would be a valuable feed to CIO’s and CTO’s if it contained information about the industry, not just Verity and its products. It’s difficult to imagine Verity publishing a feed that contains information about its competitors, but it’s very likely this type of marketing strategy will occur.

Companies that engage in this level of transparency will likely be the ones that have superior technology and have little fear of being compared with competitive products. In fact, many companies today invite comparison so this type of content aggregation should not be problem for them. RSS is well suited for this strategy because it is based on trust and belief that consumers will make good choices. Although this seems counter-intuitive, companies like NetHawk Interactive are beginning to see the benefits and are guiding their long-time email marketing clients to understand the level of trust required to build relationships with RSS.