The Moonwatcher blog has a great, simple explanation of the business benefits of RSS (don’t be put of if you aren’t the corporate type). The gist of it is that RSS enables you to find key information not be surfing around your favorite web sites, not for manually searching for key words, but by subscribing to content feeds you decide to monitor.

I would emphasize that there remains plenty of room for serendipitous discovery. People whose sites I subscribe to are always recommending interesting items online and scanning my feed reader inbox can lead to some pretty unpredictable places via their suggestions. Likewise subscribing to a search need not lead to a silo or a walled garden. Searches can be as specific or as general as you wish, and so too can your search feeds. Here are some examples:

• I subscribe to an Icerocket search of blogs for the word “podcasters.” As you can imagine, that creates a huge channel of information that only occasionally do I read a lot of. But items regularly appear when I read the newest items of all my feeds at once. Via that search feed I’ve (a) found a client (b) kept up with the industry news with a wide angle view and (c) gotten perspective into the day-to-day workings of the podcasting culture, as random podcasters’ blogs have passed my eyes on their way down my RSS stream.
• I subscribe to several searches for my own blog’s URL and my name. Manual vanity searches are ineffective and may do serious damage to your psyche! Now that I’m subscribed to those searches, I have the results delivered to me automatically every day. Even my little blog here gets at least one inbound link just about every day. I am able to participate in those discussions all the more when I know by whom and where I’m being linked to. Plus, if anyone says anything nasty about me online – I’ll know right away.
• I also subscribe to searches that never or rarely find any results. My favorite example is the search I’ve subscribed to for audio from the Blogher conference. When the conference happened I wanted to hear audio of the discussions there. I searched Podscope and Blinkx.com but didn’t find much at the time. So I subscribed to the RSS feed for the search in Blinkx, and now I have an audio channel feeding into my agregator inbox of new audio about the Blogher conference whenever it becomes available online. I’m certainly not out searching for it on a regular basis, or ever again!

Yes RSS is a really incredible technology, and this is only the beginning. My RSS reader is my personal news desk, bringing the information I need to me from hundreds of different sources into one accessible place. I’ll be writing more and more about RSS related issues in the coming weeks, it’s one of the primary things I’m excited about right now.

Technorati Tags: RSS, search, reputation, research, audio, efficiency, net2