I've written before about how to market newsfeeds to consumers. Today, I'll discuss marketing newsfeeds to webmasters.

To illustrate some of the motivations and challenges relevant to marketing to webmasters, I'll relate my entry into the newsfeed world. I took my first steps into the world of RSS about a year and a half ago. I was looking for ways to enhance one of my websites, and heard of these things called newsfeeds that sounded like just what I needed: a stream of fresh content that I wouldn't have to lift a finger to publish. I wasn't able to find any newsfeeds that were exactly what I was looking for, but I found something that was good enough. Next, I needed a way to display the newsfeed on my site. I poked around the web a little and didn't find any tools that were entirely up to the job, so I downloaded a little example code and modified it to do what I needed. (Out of that grew CaRP, but that's another story). I started off importing a few newsfeeds into a few of my webpages. Then I started publishing feeds on a few of my sites, hoping to 1) have my content syndicated elsewhere to bring in more traffic. 2) enable people to keep up on my site's changes more easily, hopefully bringing them back regularly to read full content. I've also started using newsfeeds as a way to display data from one part of my site on another part of my site.

So what reasons would a webmaster have for using newsfeeds? 1) They can provide fresh content automatically, keeping a site alive without any effort. 2) Publishing newsfeeds can drive traffic to one's site. 3) Integrating content between parts of one's own site is easier using a standardized format. These are the messages webmasters need to hear.

What challenges face webmasters wanting to use newsfeeds? Depending on how they want to use the feeds: 1) Finding, installing, and configuring software to display them. 2) Finding suitable newsfeeds that can legally be republished. 3) Finding, installing, and configuring software for generating newsfeeds. Without ready answers to these challenges, we'll lose most of our audience rather quickly.

Syndic8 has a good list of feeds, but I find it's interface a little short of user friendly. A Yahoo!-like directory on the homepage would probably be a lot more useful and user-friendly than all of the "5 featured" and "5 most recent" lists they have there. If it were immediately obvious upon arriving at the site that it contained a categorized directory of feeds, that would go a long way toward making finding a suitable feed feel easy.

As for the tools, it's easy enough to find a list of RSS readers, sometimes even including feature comparisons. More difficult is to find lists of RSS parsers, and I don't know that I've ever seen a comparison of different parsers. I could write one myself, but being a parser developer, I'd have a difficult time claiming objectivity. Even more difficult than finding newsfeed parsers is finding tools to generate newsfeeds. Because generating a newsfeed requires some knowledge of the format of the source data, most feed generators are integrated into content production systems like blogging software. Scrapers can also be found to generate newsfeeds from HTML pages, but since knowledge of the structure of the page is necessary in order to construct a meaningful feed, such solutions tend to require more technical expertise than can be expected of most of the target market for them. If some objective party could throw together some comparisons and reviews of the tools, that would be a great asset to the newsfeed community.