by: Tony Dean
The nature of cyberspace is changing fast with the rush now on to set up rss news feeds. Every gram of news and current affairs is gleaned from the four corners of the globe so that we may be informed as to what is happening in hundreds of different commercial fields of endeavour.
Everything from what new item is selling well on eBay, to what "Wired Magazine" is saying about the latest technology. More and more magazine and newspaper publishers are gaining a foothold on this new juggernaut which is going to change the way we gather news.
Advertisers too are not left out. Already some of the largest media companies in the world are now poised to find advertising space for their clients 'branding' campaigns, on any available web page that regularly features in rss feeds.
The media companies with billions of ad dollars to spend, will they say, be spending less on newspaper and t.v. advertising in the coming years, and will concentrate instead on 'blogs' and rss feeds.
Competition will be fierce for every available space on the most popular feeds, some run by newspapers!
Many freelance journalists will be running rss feeds in direct competition with the newspaper employers who now pay them to gather news for their publication. There will be no editor to censor their news items, they will be free to write whatever they want.
This new found freedom for anyone in the world to be able to express their opinions without it costing anything, will make for a new 'House Of Babel', with maybe up to several millions of rss feeds within the next five years run by private individuals all over the world. The only needed resource to set up a rss feed is free hosting on a server anywhere in the world, and these web hosts are plentiful.
Press releases submitted to the biggest and well known media release agencies are appearing rapidly on rss feeds, with the publishers of these feeds scambling to put 'content' on their feed almost on an hourly basis.
Commercial enterprises have never had it so good to get their press release into circulation so quickly as more and more commercial news, via press releases, is needed to fill the ever available channels being run by rss feed publishers. Even badly written press releases that under normal circumstances would not find a publisher willing to print it, will be readily accepted by rss feed publishers looking avidly for more 'content'. This 'content' may only be on a rss feed for the space of one hour before it is replaced by something else, but it will have the potential to be seen by lillions of people world wide.
This is the 'potential' that big media companies are now eyeing.
One rss feed publisher charges $6,000 for an item of news to be on one of his feeds for the space of one day. So the potential for earning substantial incomes from publishing your own rss feed can be huge.
Many web publishers will change tack and embrace rss feeds as being potentially more commercially viable than publishing a web site.
Many 'spammers' will change to running as many rss feeds as possible to saturate the market, since spam filters are proving very effective for email.
How easy is it to put up a rss feed?
If you have web hosting already, it can be set up in 5 minutes!
All it needs is a text file placed on the server, and the 'feed' is live to the whole world. Instant rss feed publishing!