Google Reader still:-

• Doesn’t support simple HTTP authentication so you can use RSS for private stuff
• Doesn’t provide a mechanism so content producers can restrict sharing stuff

This is important… if you want to provide premium content from a membership site in a form that is most accessible for your subscribers.

It is even important for anyone using stock photos with a contract/license limited to a certain number of views for which you are personally liable. If you allow people to share blog posts that contain stock photos, it is a significant financial risk… but I am not a lawyer.

But segmentation? Not unless every subscriber had a unique feed… Feed Magic had it

In theory you could also segment private feeds provided by membership software such as Your Members, but that is complex customization.
And of course you would want your multi-modal marketing efforts – RSS, Twitter, Email, Video etc to all be somehow within. the same interface so you could segment based upon various content interaction.

If you have 5 different people who shared a segmented RSS feed, which was personalised, you would be in all kinds of problems – the viewing and click data would be useless… plus there are privacy concerns.

I Am About To Hammer My RSS Feed

I am sorry, blame Google
Blame the people who supported and evangelised sharing of RSS rather than exploring ways that it could be used to make it more personal, valuable and ultimately important in people’s lives.
RSS could be more than just reading blogs… there is no such thing as RSS spam – it is opt-in only.

There will be a percentage of my readers that will appreciate what I will be reviewing extensively over the next week or so, Stomper 999, including offering a significant bonus as soon as the site goes live.

Stomper 999 isn’t just about training… there are some nifty new tools as well, plus a few old favorites.

There are also likely to be 1000s of people looking (via search engines) for solid information about what is on offer, and I believe I can give some significant insight whether or not they feel my bonus offer is the one they are going to pounce on.
Syndication of my RSS feed helps people find my content.

You may have already seen something about the Stomper 999 launch – it has been spammed all over twitter, there has been chat on a number of forums, and a few people have already been hammering their mailing lists… at least those who don’t segment their email lists extensively.

If you haven’t.. it is worth checking out, and you will hear a lot more over the next few days, and that will include multiple blog post form me, many of which will contain useful insight.

I am also going to intersperse a few rants and unique tips for variety.

I apologise in advance if you are someone who believes everything should be free – information, tools, consulting time etc, or if you can’t budget to invest a little more in your business (I am a strong believer in only investing profits in your online education). If you can’t really afford something, don’t buy it… or do as I often do and be highly selective in where you invest your money.

If you have seen rumours about the new Stompernet pricing, the rumours are true, and it is a lot more affordable, and in many ways the offer at the new significantly lower price point is better than when you had to invest $800/month.

It will be a Mafia Offer – an offer too good to refuse, and one I can’t think of anyone who can honestly compete with it.

No I am not going to tell you how much just yet… affiliates have been asked not to reveal pricing, though I am not going to be the one leaking it.

I am someone who loves using RSS, but at the same time as a business owner I find RSS is not living up to its current billing.

Whilst I haven’t mentioned RSS day before on this blog, I have known about Daniel’s plans for a month, and I might have been the first one to suggest using a dedicated site to promote RSS Day. This avoids what might be looked on as purely an attempt at linkbait.

Premium RSS Content

• I want to be able to provide premium content delivered by RSS
• I also want to consume premium content delivered by RSS.
• I am honestly sick of paying for access to content, but having to visit each site in turn to actually read it.

The premium content is currently served behind pay walls, as web content, PDFs, sometimes even video. All of this content could easily be delivered by RSS.
It is even often the case that Google is allowed to index this content, and serve advertising on it, but if I want to read it, I have to actually visit the site.

Against Google Business Model

Google makes money serving advertising along side or within content, thus in many ways it serves Google’s long term goals if “all information is free”

Unfortunately some content isn’t “mass market” and takes a huge amount of time in preparation – CPC, CPA & CPM monetization solutions are not sufficient compensation.

In addition, using authentication, it is possible to deliver different content to different users. For Google that would mean that the open rate of individual RSS feeds would be less valuable within their search algorithms.

But That Is What Email Is For

I know people will argue that if you want private delivery of information, email is the perfect choice. There are huge drawbacks.

• Spam filters block content we want to receive – sometimes I even get my contact form messages arriving in Gmail’s spam bin
• Opt-In Mechanisms are confusing for many readers – only 60% of the people who initially requested to receive my blog content by Feedburner’s RSS to Email service actually confirmed their subscription
• CAN SPAM – there are lots of hoops to jump through for commercial email, and these are increasing
• Multimedia – why can’t I watch a YouTube video in Gmail yet?
• Privacy – some people are scared to give out their primary email address

Reading email seems to be a very selective process with significant restraints for security

• You can’t read a “river of email” even though that would be a huge time saver
• I don’t know of an email client that allows you to quickly share emails using a single hotkey combination – it is possible to apply filters for forwarding, but that is less liable to human error when tired, drunk, or when you have a 1 year old on your lap

Suggestions For Google Reader

• Google Reader needs to support some kind of HTTP Authentication for access to secure personal content
• Support for controls that restrict sharing of content to shared public accessible feeds – not just the primary shared feeds, but also label shared feeds

This isn’t the first time I have written about this, in many ways this is a pet topic as it is very much a core feature I want to be able to use for my business both as a provider of premium content, and a consumer.

Corporate Solutions

I know there are corporate solutions available which feature quite extensive control, after all for internal adoption of RSS for company intranets, this level of control is essential.

Many existing consumer RSS Readers support authentication – it isn’t a major programming hurdle, though might consume additional storage resources – I can’t beleive Google lack the resources to make this possible.

Premium content is something that needs to be accessible by consumers, thus I hope that any future solution provided by Google isn’t planned for their premium business solutions.

The Future Of RSS (at least on this blog)

In the near future I plan to deliver premium content by RSS – much of it will still be free of charge – if at that time Google Reader doesn’t support various access controls, I will restrict access and block Google Reader

This might be looked on as extreme, but I first discussed these problems in October 2006

Totally Illogical

Lets look at this from a number of points of logic

• Best “public” content – if you are reserving your best content for subscribers, then you might be limiting the number of subscribers you receive. I look on this as a little different to “premium content” that might be served within a membership site or private RSS feed / email list – there is a different level of commitment.
• RSS Syndication – your RSS content isn’t only available in feed readers, it can also appear on multiple syndication sites for easy reading without subscription
• Scrapers and Search – Your subscriber only content is going to appear on RSS scraper sites, possibly without even a link back to you, but not on your own site – how logical is that?

If the content really is intended just for your subscribers, lock it away in a membership area and require registration to access it, even if you subsequently serve it though some kind of password protected RSS Feed using Http authentication or customer unique feeds.

You can even have premium content indexed, but blocked by a pay wall.

I understand there are psychological benefits advertising that subscribers to your feed gain access to content not available on the main blog, but realistically the methods people use are shooting themselves in the foot.

You can easily achieve what you want with Google Reader, as it is possible to share tags.

The following is IMHO (in my honest opinion) and IANAL (I am not a lawyer)

It would be advisable you choose your content extremely carefully based on the copyright of the fed items.
Only use sources you can trust to own 100% rights to the material they publish. If they are using licensed content, either articles or images, refeeding content might be a copyright issue.

If you do offer republished feeds, you need to decide to use full content or only excerpts. Just because a feed is provided in full for a reader, might not mean the owner of the content supports the use of the full feed content for another website.

I have read even Google pay companies for syndicated content. Why shouldn’t you have to respect copyright as well?

Should your refeed be indexed by the search engines? You don’t want it to be regarded as a splog.

If you intend to undertake refeeding, I would also suggest you should do it from a feed reader that is not your primary reader. There are lots of services that provide RSS feeds of personal data, and it might cause problems if you refed content you didn’t want to, or even worse, information you were privy to, but was not public knowledge.

Be very careful if you decide to monetise the site where the content is eventually published, as even a link through to your primary domain could be looked on as commercial.

When I first discussed the problem with sharing content with Google Reader, it was pretty much ignored.

My second post on this subject did receive some more attention, notably Robert Scoble, and I would like to thank him for at least opening up some discussion on the subject.

I have been accused of being “RSS Police”, when in fact I am looking for some controls to be introduced to determine the way content can be shared, that would actually make the arguement for RSS Syndication stronger, not weaker.

Now I have mentioned Mike Filsaime’s Death of Internet Marketing Report. I used an affiliate link, why throw money away if someone is willing to pay you to send them traffic for a free report? I did very clearly disclose it was an affiliate link, and the amount I expected to earn from my recommendation wouldn’t even cover the cost of writing a single paragraph about it.

So here is another link to the report, this time it is straight to the primary domain. I make no money from this link, and I can only track it through Google Analytics. (If you click it in an RSS reader, I will never know)

The Death of Internet Marketing

Here is a link I make one buck from. It also gives me an indication that at least people click on the link.

From that data I know that 14 people clicked my original link, and only one person was smart enough to sign up and possibly read a report that could change the way they look on copyright and RSS feeds.

That is SAD!

I spent probably more than an hour writing my original recommendation to read the report, those 14 people obviously hadn’t read it, but only 1 person was willing to give their email address.

I am spending much more than an hour again to encourage you to download it. I don’t have a massive readership, and some might have already read the report (I really hope so).

I am spending this time to help those 13 people who clicked through last time, but for some reason didn’t trust my recommendation.

My reason for promoting the ebook was nothing really to do with making one buck, or the cyclic nature of marketing. I have experienced that for years in the computer games industry, and even Mike’s “Skulls concept” is very similar to a developer/publisher relationship for games development.

Mike might release the report in the future in a way that doesn’t require an email address. Then again, releasing reports into “the wild” without some method of following up and making corrections might be looked on as irresponsible. Actually he has made some changes since the initial release (mainly typographic), the report is up to version 1.4 now.

Don’t forget to also read the Paypal Report, it is a good read.

The Ideal Way to Deliver Such Content

RSS is a way to deliver content that a user chooses to subscribe to. There is no way to spam your RSS Reader.

However publishers of content need some way to suggest content shouldn’t be shared, or possibly prevent it being shared. After all, some content you are expected to pay for.

RSS Authentication is sufficient to protect the original source of content. We just now need a way for the copyright of content to be respected.

I can’t think of any business that promoted an easy way to share email with your friends.

Once RSS can be labelled as private, then innovators will be encouraged to offer a feed-burner like service for subscribing to private content, either by RSS, or a gateway to email.

Readers of the content would have enhanced privacy, with the option to unsubscribe at any time, and even with email delivery, the provider of the content wouldn’t need personal information unless payment was required.

The Danger in a Growing Trend

Can you afford to defend yourself against a DMCA claim? Some services might be able to claim “safe harbour”. I am not sure that would apply for individuals.

Please refer to previous articles with possible solutions for sharing RSS via reblogging, and also suggestions on how feeds could be protected in some way. Make sure you read the comments as well.

I hope the time I have invested in writing this post proves worthwhile, mainly for those 13 people who are scared to give their email address to someone.

p.s. the email subscription to this blog is with Feedburner, and totally private. All I receive is vague open rate statistics, and not access to your email address.

It looks like a great service, especially because it is free, and I have lots of domains to monitor that I might not visit personally very often.

I would love to see Widgets for other services.

It is another service that provides RSS feeds of valuable personal data I am sure you will want to share.

The RSS Feeds are not protected by RSS Authentication, thus you can share them from Google Reader.

Even if you had RSS Authentication, you could still share the data from other RSS Readers without any warning that it is data you might not intend sharing.

RSS is not just about sharing blog entries. The potential of RSS is much greater, but some level of automatic flagging of feeds “noshare” needs to be implemented.

One good way to use the Montastic data might be to add the RSS feed to the Admin of all your WordPress Installations.