It's no secret that I am not very fond of press releases and traditional PR speak. My preference goes to those company that have the guts and the brains to show their competence, skill and story openly, without hiding behind lots of stock photos and hyped-up marketing content.
Nonetheless my preference, there is a hell of a lot of press releases covering the web conferencing, real-time collaboration and live presentation tools industries and not all of it is full of yet unreleased, upcoming stuff. There are some interesting items too and, as always, it depends very much on what you are after.
For me and others looking for trusted news about new tools, features, trends, user applications there is not much indeed. But for those financially initiated stock investors, traders and business analysts looking for company moves, mergers, joint ventures, product announcements and official revenue reports, there is a lot of possibly valuable data in those press releases.
If you are not familiar with this type of content check out the front page of news reporting leader ConferencingNews.com, and you can see what I am talking about.
As many of you, I personally enjoy reading all of the breaking news in one place, and not by having to travel to twenty different web sites each day. Due to this, RSS feed availability has become some sort of threshold separating those sites and sources that I can follow on a systematic basis from those which I can see only from time to time.
But unfortunately, the major industry sites carrying PR headlines for the industry, ConferencingNews.com and ConferZone.com, do not provide any RSS feed for that valuable selected and aggregated content they publish daily.
I can understand their desire to get us to visit their sites so that we can increase a bit their banner impressions, but what we are really seeking from them is to be updated, in the simplest way possible about what is happening in this industry.
Going back to a site on a daily basis is not very exciting, and this is where RSS plays in so well. Subscribers get the info they want without needing to share their email, and they are free to unsubscribe whenever they want. Not only. They can now receive these news in one unique place, be it their email client, or a Web-based RSS news aggregator like Bloglines, My Yahoo or Kinja.
RSS does not penalize loyalty and Web visits, because it allows to retain a much larger audience of interested followers while allowing them to click through bac to the site for more in-depth information.
RSS is not evil. It is user-centric info distribution. It allows to extend reach, loyalty, visibility without intruding into users activities with ads or promotional emails.
RSS is good.
And so I decided to share a present with you all, by providing RSS feeds for both ConferencingNews.com and ConferZone.com.
ConferencingNews home page headlines on RSS - RSS 2.0 feed
ConferZone home page headlines on RSS - RSS 2.0 feed
I hope these can be useful to many of you and that the publishers of these two online magazines will appreciate the value that these RSS newsfeeds may bring to them too.
RSS is Good. Enjoy it.
