The Internet has spawned the largest content creation boom in the history of personkind.
This explosion of news and views among professional journalists and consumers has serious implications for practitioners whose job it is to monitor public opinion as well as monitoring what’s being written and debated in the public domain.
Given that search engines only index around 40% of Internet content and there’s only so many pages of links you can trawl through in a day, what are the alternatives?
There are aggregated search applications such as Copernic which help, but still face the same issues as what they’re aggregating. Then there are monitoring applications such as WebClipping or EWatch which trawl the web looking for mentions of your company or client – but anyone who uses them knows these have severe limitations.
Today, you are probably using a combination of these approaches. However there is an additional helper application for PR pros trying to stay on top of the news. RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication – depending on who to talk to!).
RSS provides immediate news feeds which can be aggregated inside an RSS news reader. Why are these useful?
Well in an ‘e-mail type’ application you can subscribe to feeds from most of the major newspapers, magazines and blogs and the headlines are all automatically downloaded, making it far easier to monitor news stories as they happen.
RSS won’t replace web browsing or our other monitoring applications, but they can definetely lighten the work load of keeping on top of all the latest news. It’s also much much faster, no waiting for loading web pages, no pop-up ads etc.
Big tech firms like IBM and SAP are now publishing their press releases as RSS feeds – a growing trend.
Why not take a look. Some of the most popular RSS readers are FeedReader (PC), NetNewsWire (Mac) and Headline Viewer (PC). I’m currently using Syndirella.
And of course PR Opinions now provides an RSS feed as well, just add http://tmurphy.blogspot.com/rss/tmurphy.xml into your RSS reader for the latest news as it happens!
The American Press Institute and JD Lasica at the Online Journalism Review both have recent stories on the impact of RSS on journalists and publications alike.
Murphy's Law 