making money with rss
TRANSCRIPT
Walter vonKochProgram Manager / Internet Explorer TeamMicrosoft Corporation
XML vocabulary describing a series of items
Several common feed formats (RSS 2.0, Atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 0.9x, …)
Sliding window of latest items
Reverse chronological order
Discovery View Subscribe
Discovery of feeds on web pages<html>
<head>
…
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title=“Technology Feed" href="Technology.xml"/>
…
</head>
<body>
…
To connect with customers
Opportunity to use informal tone
"What's New" newsletter, not as email spam
Content may be different then what's on the web page
Things change
Let users subscribe so they can monitor change
Offline connection with users
Feeds that are Lists
List semantic
Order matters and is preserved
Complete set of items
Concept: Next week’s #1 replaces today’s #1
and should no longer be in the list
<channel>
<cf:treatAs>list</cf:treatAs>
…
Reverse chronological ordering is not always best
Show viewer items
Let users "play" with the items
Feeds that are Lists
<channel>
<cf:listinfo>
<cf:sort ns=“…" label="Buy It Now price" element="BuyItNowPrice" data-type="number" default="no“/>
<cf:sort ns=“…" label="Current auction price" element="CurrentPrice" data-type="number" default="no“/>
<cf:sort ns=“…" label="Listing end time" element="EndTime" data-type="date" default="no“/>
<cf:sort ns=“…" label="Number of bids" element="BidCount" data-type="number" default="no“/>
<cf:group ns=“…" label="listing format" element="AuctionType“/>
<cf:group ns=“…" label="option" element="ItemCharacteristic“/>
<cf:group ns=“…" label="listing category" element="Category“/>
</cf:listinfo>
Where is the money?
Advertizing within feeds
Driving clicks back to the site
Interactive Feeds
Links to other products
Purchase-Now on items
Full vs partical content discussion:http://scobleizer.com/2007/04/19/full-text-vs-partial-text-feeds-argument-495/
Secondary traffic effects
Influencers use feeds
Digg, StumbleUpon, …
Brings non-RSS users back to the site
No one answer for every business
RSS won't make your content or product better
But it can increase its exposure
Feeds are just another tool in your online toolbox
Try common ideas
Try your own novel ideas
Try, measure, iterate - to find what works best
When publishing feeds remember:
<guid> prevents duplicate items
<pubDate> to have predictable sorting
<title> lets users scan for what to read
Emit well-formed XML including content
Choose the feed format that you want; but choose only one
Consider Partial vs Full content in feed
A List should be treatedAs a list
Sort and Filter controls
What else?
Enclosures
Item extensions
RSS can a good tool to bring collection of items to the client
Feed/content specific client apps
Beyond the Generic Feed Readers
Highly interactive
Feeds can bring the web and clients together today
RSS is really simple, but would you want to build yet another RSS fetcher?
Consider the Windows RSS Platform
It does more then parse really simple xml
Scheduling
Background download
Sanitization
Storage
…
Download
Engine
RSS 0.9x
RSS 1.0
RSS 2.0
Atom
Browsers Photos Widgets …
News Blogs Photos Audio Calendars Lists …
MergeProcessor
CommonFeedlist
Items Enclosures
RSS Object Model
Store
Service
API
COM API
- Automation (IFeed…)
- Early-bound (IXFeed…)
- Not safe-for-scripting!
- Design based on .NET Framework Design Guidelines
- Use type library importer (TLBIMP) to create managed wrappers
FeedsManager
FeedFolder
Feed
FeedItem
FeedEnclosure
FolderEvents
FeedEvents
Scheduled Background Download
Conditional GET & Delta encoding
gzip compression
Throttled Requests
“Salted” Scheduling
Progressive back-off
<ttl> aware
Enclosure Download
Using BITS (HTTP RANGE requests)
Share lessons from email and web-browsers
Don’t trust the source
Don’t trust the content
Don’t trust the enclosures
Make downloaded locations hard to guess
Defense in depth
RSS-specific
Explicit subscription list
Err on the side of strict
Validate and Sanitize feed content
No executable enclosures
Make sure your feeds make sense in generic readers
RSS isn't always the right technology (e.g. real-time streaming stock quotes)
Innovate
RSS Team blog: blogs.msdn.com/rssteam
Windows RSS Platform documentation:http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms684701.aspx
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