Yet Another Subscription Model at Microsoft

At Seattle's Gnomedex technology conference (http://www.gnomedex.com/), a cutting-edge exploration of emerging Internet technologies like RSS... ...Blogging and Podcasting, Microsoft demonstrated IE7 publicly for the first time and announced (Two Ways Forward From Here RSS has been touted (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login), which are similar to RSS feeds except that they feed your content to Google, rather than to the world of RSS aggregators, thereby (it is hoped) improving the accuracy of its search results. We'll explore SiteMaps a little further next week, after we get our own SiteMap up and running. Microsoft's embrace of the RSS model is hard to dismiss, especially given the enthusiasm and openness that the company seems to be bringing to the project. A public beta release of IE7 is due out sometime this summer, showcasing this technology, and when Longhorn arrives next year sometime, the idea that our content will be flowed automatically through the OS and a wide range of associated applications is very appealing. Okay! I'm Convinced Already! What Do I Do? Creating an RSS feed couldn't be much easier. You simply create a simple XML file describing the content you wish to syndicate and place it somewhere on your site. The file, a simple text file, uses straightforward self-explanatory tags like <title> and <link> to describe each <item> you want to syndicate (this article would be a new <item> , for example) and then set about keeping your sites up to date. You don't need to run a blog or anything like that to have an RSS feed. Just find a good tutorial like this one at SearchEngineWatch (