By: Adam Williams
Freelance Business Consultant

Due to my interest in RSS, (Really Simple Syndication) I was in the process of researching information for an article (not this one) on the growing trend towards its use.  With business in the UK it is proving very successful in PR sales promotion and with the news media it seems to be a must, but could it also be a useful tool for others groups?.

If you make a search for “Volunteer Rescue RSS / XML” on Google (Emergencyrescue.com) are the first one listed, on Yahoo the first and third entries are (Emergencyrescue.com), if you go onto domainhelp.search.
com, four out of the ten listed on the page are (Emergencyrescue.com), that is a very high ranking for any web page, therefore I was not at all surprised when I enquired with the ERC as to how may views their “Links and Feeds” page received each week and was informed it was on average between eight hundred and one thousand.

Why do you think so many people are viewing your feeds page:

There are tens of thousands of people involved in volunteer rescue world- wide including the support groups etc and they all wish to keep up to date with news and current events, RSS lets them do this without having to troll through dozens of websites each week just to find that the news page has not been updated and they have already read it the week before.

How do you promote your links and feeds page:

Answer, via RSS what ells?

How does this work for the teams:

A team publishes their new RSS feed and we publish it on our page list, then we update our RSS Feed to announce the new feed(s) this is then automatically flagged up on peoples RSS readers, they take down the new team feeds into their readers and from then on every time the team(s) update their RSS feed they get to read It and click through to the teams news page for their latest news, its as simple as that.

Why do you think RSS is working so well:

People are fed up with being constantly bombarded with e-mails telling them of this and that, most of which are of no interest to them what so ever, (push-based information), RSS is (pull-based information) the subscriber accesses your information, as and when he or she wants, as RSS is becoming more popular if this option is not available to them then they will not go searching websites for team news.

What are the benefits of teams using RSS:

* RSS feeds syndicate your news and make it available to other outlets
* You can reach a much wider audience
* RSS is a secure channel that can't be spammed
* RSS does not involve you in privacy issues as subscription is
   anonymous
* You have direct access to your subscribers and guaranteed delivery
   of your content

Why are there so few teams running RSS at the moment:

Many reasons, the three main ones are

1] Its early days yet
2] Many will see it as a fad that will go away and if it does not, then
    they will do it
3] Certain teams will be keeping tabs on the teams that are running
    RSS to see if it benefits them, and when they see it does, then they
    will take it up.

So what’s next, Team Blogs:

One step at a time, lets sort out the RSS first.

Thanks for the interview:

Our pleasure.

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Mr Adam Williams is a freelance business consultant based in London UK.

Please Note: The search for "Volunteer Rescue RSS / XML" was conducted between 11.00 and 12.00hours on 05/March/2007 and was correct at that time.

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