By: Nidhi Gupta

Using RSS as a source of timely and up-to-date information is a positive evolution and a definite step forward from where we are now. The advantages of RSS over traditional emails are:

1. RSS is timely. Subscribers get updates and breaking news as soon as they are published and not on the date the newsletter is due. RSS allows us to plug into selected sources of information, like independent reporters, researchers and industry analysts and when they disseminate or report some new information, it allows us to be the first to get it, without having to subscribe to any newsletter, or having to disclose our email address to a new, unknown company.

2. RSS is cost-effective. Cost of delivery and distribution is reduced dramatically. No more paying a mailing list distribution provider, nor having to format and layout news and articles for a different media than the website.

3. RSS is standards-compliant. (If wanted) Maximum compatibility is preserved allowing email subscribers with text, HTML, AOL or MIME Multipart preferences to all receive well formed news updates perfectly compatible with your email client.

4. RSS is email independent. Email client not required. RSS news and feeds can be easily read online, aggregated into a web page journal/portal, sent out to SMS clients or managed to create new online content.

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5. RSS can be integrated fully in your email. Yes, no one forbids the final user from using new services and tools which do allow perfect integration and receipt of RSS feeds inside your email Inbox (e.g., NewsGator, BlogStreet Info Aggregator).

6. RSS facilitates organization of content. Relevant messages can be easily archived, sorted and organized according to topic, in a fully automated way, something impossible with previously non-standard newsletters.

7. The subscriber is again in full control. Subscription and removal from a news feed is totally under the control of the user, unlike now where users may receive many newsletters that make it very hard or unintuitive to unsubscribe.

8. RSS is private. Privacy and security protection. RSS subscriber never have to provide an email address to their selected information provider. Publishers cannot as a consequence easily resell those emails to unscrupulous marketers and email spammers. RSS is hardly spammable as you always know the source of each news item received, and there is no easy way yet to easily hack into the system.

9. RSS is fully resuable. RSS is a structured, re-usable content protocol that allows the content to be reused for many other purposes: feeding of other news channels and Web pages, integration into dynamic libraries and learning objects.

10. RSS is searchable. RSS can be fully indexed and searched just as Google does with the HTML content on the Internet. See Feedster for a great live example.

11. RSS is secure. RSS cannot yet carry viruses or trojans like a newsletter or email attachment can. If it did, you could easily isolate and identify the source of your infection.
12. RSS is modifiable. Even after it has been sent out. Nobody forbids your ability to change a current posting, or revise an errata, and thus RSS subscribers indeed seamlessly receive that posted update. As a matter of fact, RSS posts can be also removed or expired, and while some would argue that this is not completely feasible, there is certainly a wide open opportunity to explore further in this direction.
13. RSS will be seamless to use. While not yet so, we are getting closer and closer to having news readers and aggregators fully integrated in email or so easy to use that it will not be a problem anymore suggesting their adoption to novice and non-technical users.
14. RSS feeds are not blocked by spam and email filters. As newsletter publishers know very well, the battle to overcome the spam barriers raised by spam and email filters is getting harder everyday while RSS-based news feeds have no such problem.
15. RSS can be monetized. RSS can support free as well as paid content distribution. Some publishers have already started text ads into their RSS-delivered news feeds. The good news is that if you don’t like it, you can unsubscribe in a matter of seconds, without having to ask anyone’s permission.
16. RSS adds value. When RSS provides an easy to use complement to your site, it clearly becomes a free value-added service. As a matter of fact, this is already happening. Lockergnome’s RSS Resource and Amazon.com Syndicated Content feeds are two great examples of this.
17. RSS paves the road for true ethical marketing. As RSS feeds provide a simple and effective way to create specialized subscription channels for your customers and potential clients. As RSS allows them to receive the specific kind of information they seek, it is perceived as a tremendous bonus and as an opportunity to simplify and reduce readers effort to reach, filter out and access the type of information they are looking for. As a consequence, there is no need for the publisher to utilize advertising to become sustainable, as the publisher HAS all of the user attention and need only to provide what the user is looking for.