Steve Outing suggests RSS as an alternative to email publishing, given the problems that email has been having with spams and viruses:
RSS allows potential readers of a Web site to view part of its content — typically headlines and short blurbs — without having to visit the content directly (unless they want to click through to it). Viewing is done with a piece of software separate from the Web browser, the RSS aggregator, which the consumer uses to subscribe to “feeds” produced by favorite Internet publishers. The feeds are constantly updated as the publishers add new content.
The big advantage of RSS to a Web publisher is that it can significantly increase a site’s visibility and reach. In the context of a news site, EEVL’s “RSS Primer for Publishers & Content Providers” explains that “because there are so many sources of news on the Internet, most of your viewers won’t come to your site every day. By providing an RSS feed, you are in front of them constantly, improving the chances that they’ll click through to an article that catches their eye.”
And by using RSS, a publisher enables others on the Internet to syndicate its headlines, so they show up on other Web sites as those publishers incorporate third-party headlines into their own sites — viewer traffic that gets funneled back to the Web site of the original publisher.
RSS+T
