thestar.com has added new online features from social bookmarking site Del.icio.us and its parent company, Yahoo!, to make it easy for users of those sites to tag and save thestar.com articles and add thestar.com RSS feeds to their customed My Yahoo! pages.
Readers will now see boxes on all articles inviting readers to "tag and save" the article to their del.icio.us accounts. When a reader clicks the link, a del.icio.us popup window prompts the reader to add keywords and a note about the page, and then adds the web address to the user's list of bookmarks in the del.icio.us database. Through the site's "social bookmarking" technology, the user can share his or her bookmarks with friends and other del.icio.us users can discover the article based on shared keyword tags.
Thestar.com has also extended its RSS feeds to include My Yahoo buttons, making it easy for My Yahoo users to add thestar.com headlines to their home pages. Thestar.com offers more than 30 RSS feeds its news, sports and entertainment headlines, blogs and podcasts, and all of these feeds can now be easily added to Yahoo's personalized home page service. (See our full range of RSS and My Yahoo feeds.)
The use of RSS (popularly parsed as "real simple syndication") feeds to distribute information on the Internet has broadened the ways that people are getting their news, and content providers, such as news sites, must make it easy for readers to take advantage of these channels or risk losing audience.
The major portal and search sites, such as Yahoo, MSN and Google, allow users to create personalized front pages that pull in headlines, classified listings, weather information and more using RSS; mobile devices, updated desktop news tickers and personalized newsletters do the same. As this kind of user-defined aggregation grows, more and more readers may come to content sites by clicking on a headline distributed by RSS rather than through the web site's home page.
Similarly, online bookmarking, community tagging and other concepts that allow people to share links and information around shared interests, or what are often called "communities of interest," offer another choice for readers over the traditional web site front page. With the explosion of these technologies and applications, there are more and more options -- some would say a dizzying array of options -- for Web surfers to choose from, and likely a shakeout and rationalization to come. The level of interest is these applications is highlighted by the current issue of Business 2.0, which offers a list "the next 25" Internet businesses to watch, many of which are related to social networks and tag-based technologies.
In the meantime, making these tools available to readers is part of the process that determines which ones are ultimately the most useful to readers, and to us.
And we can also say this with some certainty: there's lots more to come.
Since the kool kids are switching to Magnolia, you’re just the tiniest bit late to the mark. But adding another button won’t kill you.
Posted by: Joe Clark | March 21, 2006 at 03:42 PM
While I think Ma.gnolia.com might gain ground, Del.icio.us is enormously popular and it makes sense to go with the latter. One difference between the two is that I don't like the temporary addresses Ma.gnolia.com assigns to links, probably for statistical purposes. If I hover over a link, I expect to see where the address is taking me -- especially if it's an unexpected media link of the WMV, MOV or PDF variety.
I'd be interested to see what the statistics are for RSS feeds. I spend plenty of time on the Web and in fact don't even use a reader. I enjoy the act of going to my favorite Web sites, taking in the design, checking out images; it's the near equivalent replacement of opening the morning newspaper.
Perhaps it's just the method of delivery that's preferred -- pulling the news to you or allowing it to push on to you. Maybe those who like newspapers like Web sites and maybe those who like radio/TV like RSS feeds? Although I suspect the technological barrier of more software prevents those who like the news rolled over them from ever getting into it -- after all, is RSS ultimately convenient when one must learn another program?
Posted by: Richard | March 22, 2006 at 09:08 PM
RSS feeds are pretty much used by fringe geeks. The average (read majority) surfer does not care much about RSS, Web 2.0, Technorati or Del.icio.us. They want their early morning coffee, news, horoscopes, weather and sports scores.
All the rest is just noise. Does anyone remember Webvan? All marketing VC hype. The difference now is that there is an online ad market willing to support the new apps which are also being held accountable to the bottom line (and being snapped up by MSN, Yahoo! and others)
At what point does the media market fragment so much that big advertisers start to lose focus or diminish their spend? Newspapers keep forgeting that their brand has value and advertisers have strong and long relationships with those brands.
Anyway it is important for sites to act like they are on the ball and paying attention to some of the new cooio apps out there and for that the Star is to be commended.
Posted by: Dean | March 23, 2006 at 11:14 AM
I like the RSS feeds. They are simple to view and take me directly to the favourites such as the Star. The new RSS readers are extremely easy to use. Being in the over 50 crowd I find it fast and not geeky at all. Running our own website with RSS feeds has moved our visitors with a big jump over the past year. I don't know if a shameless plug is okay go get the FREE RSS Reader Albion as it is so easy to use and that comes from a guy over 50! And it takes you directly to the page you want to read online.
Posted by: Dennis Cambly | April 01, 2006 at 10:02 AM