So… here we go again. After the ugly php 5.2 output buffer crashes, we now have the php 5.3 logic bugs:
$foo = 0; var_dump('foo' == $foo); // true var_dump($foo == 'foo'); // true var_dump('foo' === $foo); // false var_dump($foo === 'foo'); // false
If your scripts are returning completely unexplainable results on php 5.3 platforms, that's one possibility to keep in mind. I initially found it while looking into memcached-related problems.
Read more…
So… according to Matt's post, WP 2.9 should be released very shortly.?I'm releasing Version Checker 2.0.2 as a result.
The latter disables core upgrade nags for non-bug fix WP releases. Experience has shown, in past years, that major WP releases need about an extra month of testing in the wild to be really stable.?You can still upgrade, when WP 2.9 gets released, under Tools / Upgrade. But WP won't nag you into doing so.
As many of you already know, WP 2.9 has been released over the WE, and… oh bummer:
I was a bit worried when I foresaw WP 2.9 showing up around Christmas. So much so, in fact, that Semiologic Pro users were prompted to disable core updates until WP 2.9.1. And rightly so:?very nasty niggles showed up when it got released.
So… if you've been following the Semiologic blog in the past weeks, you've probably skipped WP 2.9. It's now time to jump into the pool and upgrade your site to WP 2.9.1.
What works best in RSS marketing? How are RSS subscribers different than e-mail subscribers? RSS publishing best practices if you want to sell?
These and other practical questions are all revealed in the 2nd part of the RSS interview with Bryan Eisenberg. Without doubt, this is one of the best and most practical RSS marketing interviews we've done so far.
In part 1 of the Bryan Eisenberg RSS interview we focused on how the GrokDotCom.com is going beyond traditional RSS Radars by employing intelligent content aggregation tools, instead of relying just on contextual filtering, and what kind of results they are achieving.
In part 2 of the interview we move beyond RSS Radars to their overall RSS marketing strategy.
In this interview find out about ...
1. How RSS subscribers are different from e-mail subscribers and why? 2. How to sell products through content-rich RSS feeds? 3. Do RSS subscribers mind seeing product promotions in your feeds? 4. When to publish your latest RSS content to get the most links from other websites and most readership? 5. What's the right RSS publishing frequency for promotional content? 6. Why branding your RSS feed is important and how to do it?
1. How RSS subscribers are different from e-mail subscribers and why?
2. How to sell products through content-rich RSS feeds?
3. Do RSS subscribers mind seeing product promotions in your feeds?
4. When to publish your latest RSS content to get the most links from other websites and most readership?
5. What's the right RSS publishing frequency for promotional content?
6. Why branding your RSS feed is important and how to do it?
Click here to listen to the MP3 file [8:33 minutes; 2 MB]
I have to apologise to Amazon for missing on two of their RSS content delivery options, which I previously missed.
Sorry guys, and thank you for the heads up.
1. Product Discussions Most Amazon.com product discussions are now available also as RSS feeds. An excellent way of keeping track of the conversations surrounding your favorite products, and certainly something more websites should implement ... especially those that provide content that people are pashionate about.
The first one that comes to mind is TV.com and their community show reviews.
2. Customer Reviews by Author Like a product reviewer? Subscribe to their Amazon.com reviews RSS feed.
Part of the upcoming 2007 edition of the RSS Marketing e-book are also the interviews we are doing with various internet marketing experts and RSS practitioners. In the following days and hopefully not too many weeks, we'll be posting those interviews here.
I'm sure most of you have heard of Bryan Eisenberg before. Bryan is the leading worldwide authority on internet marketing optimization and website persuasion architecture. He was also one of the few marketers that got on the RSS Marketing bandwagon early on.
Recently, Bryan started exploring RSS Radars as a tool to increase the traffic to their optimization portal GrokDotCom.com, increase visitor loyalty, position the website as the key news source for internet optimization ... and naturally facilitate online sales of their books and consulting services. Take a look here.
But while most RSS Radars are based on contextually filtering content from selected third-party RSS feeds, the GrokDotCom.com RSS Radars go far beyond anything else we have seen on the market so far.
Instead of relying only on contextual content filtering to select the most relevant third-party content, they are employing a number of additional filters, such as the amount of linkage the story is receiving, source relevance and credibility, and so on ... and they're calling it a discovery engine.
All of these answers, and more, available in the audio interview.
Click here to listen to the MP3 file [14 minutes; 3 MB]
RSS Radars are not just a tool to help you enrich your website content and allow you to easily conduct business intelligence, but can also be used as a B2B Customer Relationship Management tool to help you maintain customer loyalty and provide your customers with some additional added value.
Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.
David's idea is simple:
This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application: "The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."
But, there are two problems:
This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.
Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.
More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book:)
Mobil Avenue accuses me of 20th century marketing thinking. I'm not quite sure what he has in mind, but it seems that my Second Life posts ticked off some people.
Now, don't get me wrong, I see alot of development potential in virtual worlds, but Second Life as it is simply does not cut it.
I won't go into the details again, but the sheer lack of economy of scales shows that something is wrong when you compare the investments in Second Life and the actual virtual world penetration. Not to mention the difficult user interface.
Second Life is a good beginning, but virtual worlds have a far way to go before they deserve to be treated as seriously as some are treating them today. Yes, Second Life should certainly be treated as a marketing/communications playground, but not as a high importance marketing channel.
If you want to call this 20th century thinking, go ahead. It is. As are economies of scale, profitability, sales conversion, cost per order and other business "relics".
And as you'll notice, 20th century thinking still works, even in 2007. We've all heard stories of the demise of advertising, the death of PR, the death of e-mail, the death of postal direct mail and so on ... but they're all alive, well and kicking still today, and will remain so.
Actually, intrusive direct response TV advertising is still one of the most effective tools to generate sales. And it gives you more bang for the buck than almost any other marketing channel, including online.
Do I like this? No. I'd love to believe that the internet is the alpha and omega of marketing. But it's not. It's the key connector, but not the key driver. That's the way things are, and as markters we need to employ 20th century thinking and use what works best ... and the numbers tell us that.
But this doesn't mean we shouldn't play and test. Quite on the contrary.
OK, this conversation is getting somewhat beyond the original topic, and it's quite possible I'm not even getting what Mobil Avenue is trying to say:)
And please don't get me started on 3D virtual webstores ...
Of course, I might be wrong. And if I am, I'll be the first to change my stripes the next day. It's what marketers do. If a new thing comes up and works better than what you're doing, change. But every change first demand proof. Unless you're just testing ... because when you're testing, the rules of the game change.
If I keep this up, I might actually get the reputation of picking on Amazon.com as a hobby [just take a look at Is Amazon Missing the RSS Advertising Opportunity?, Why is Everyone Missing the RSS Transactional Messaging Opportunity? and Get the Most from RSS Marketing ... Take Your DM Hat Off!].
It's just one of those things. You see a company that could really go above and beyond with RSS and really use it to drive revenues, but they just don't do it.
But at least they're showing some activitiy lately ... [in addition to removing their list of relatively useless category feeds, which used to be available here]
a) Gold Box Gold Box is a service that provides you with personalized deals every day. It finally has an RSS feed with your daily deals.
But, unfortunatelly, the RSS feed only provides brief information about the product, instead of also giving you a direct purchase link, some of the latest product reviews and other information that could facilitate the sale. Also, there's no personalization, or so it seems. Why not give me an RSS feed with just the special deals for me, based on my previous purchases?
b) Plog This is one of the genius Amazon ideas. Each Plog is personalized to the individual user, giving him the latest blog posts from Amazon's authors (just from the authors' whos books you've purchased), and it also comes with a targeted RSS feed, matching the Plog content you see when you're logged-in. You can also subscribe to additional blog content manually.
Also, Amazon is promising that we'll be soon able to track latest releases, changes to our orders and "much more" through our plogs, which will presumably also come be published in our targeted RSS feeds.
Amazon, please keep this up. Make us happy:)
c) The Amazon API But let's be fair to Amazon. Even though their end-user RSS feed offering is poor, they do provide developers with the ability to create their own RSS feeds from Amazon, by integrating with their API.
Here are some examples:
RSStalker.com - provides a variety of Amazon product tracking options via RSS, such as a 10% price drop feed that lets you know when a product that RSStalker is tracking via Amazon drops 10% in price; RSS feeds from your wishlists; last 25 price changes in a selected Amazon category, and more.
Baebo - provides a persistant search RSS feed for Amazon products, based on your keywords.
More great examples floating around ...
WebProNews has a short summary from Amanda Watlington's tips for SEO optimization of your RSS feeds:
1. Subscribe to your own feed and claim it on blog engine Technorati 2. Focus your feed with a keyword theme 3. Use keywords in the title tag; keep it under 100 characters 4. Most feed readers display feeds alphabetically, title accordingly 5. Write description tags as if for a directory; keep them under 500 characters 6. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item 7. Provide email updates for the non-techies 8. Offer an HTML version of your feed 9. For branding, add logo and images to your feed
2. Focus your feed with a keyword theme
3. Use keywords in the title tag; keep it under 100 characters
4. Most feed readers display feeds alphabetically, title accordingly
5. Write description tags as if for a directory; keep them under 500 characters
6. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item
7. Provide email updates for the non-techies
8. Offer an HTML version of your feed
9. For branding, add logo and images to your feed
Now, let's add some tips from Stephan Spencer and continue with the numbering:
10. Full text, not summaries 11. 20 or MORE items (not just 10) 12. Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post) 13. Keyword-rich item [title] 14. Your brand name in the item [title] 15. Your most important keyword in the site [title] container 16. Compelling site [description] 17. Don't put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss) 18. An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines
11. 20 or MORE items (not just 10)
12. Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post)
13. Keyword-rich item [title]
14. Your brand name in the item [title]
15. Your most important keyword in the site [title] container
16. Compelling site [description]
17. Don't put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss)
18. An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines
And to round this off, a summary of my own tips [part 2 here] for using RSS to drive traffic to your site:
19. Get your RSS content (proactively) syndicated on other relevant websites [just the headlines and summaries of course] 20. Submit your RSS feeds to all the RSS search engines and directories 21. Use RSS to add relevant third-party content [again, just headlines and summaries] to your website to gain additional SE weight for your keywords 22. Use RSS to deliver all of your frequently updated content, not just for your latest blog posts 23. Whenever the content in your feed changes, ping the most important search engines and directories [yes, you don't need a blog for this]
20. Submit your RSS feeds to all the RSS search engines and directories
21. Use RSS to add relevant third-party content [again, just headlines and summaries] to your website to gain additional SE weight for your keywords
22. Use RSS to deliver all of your frequently updated content, not just for your latest blog posts
23. Whenever the content in your feed changes, ping the most important search engines and directories [yes, you don't need a blog for this]
Do you have more tips?
(a) Post them in the comments form below.
(b) E-mail me at info@marketingstudies.net and let's set-up an interview
You are not going to die. You might think you are, but you are not going to die.
It's a good day to die.
[Participants] had to surrender to death to survive it.
Semiologic Pro users with an up to date site will not be seeing it in their dashboard, since I've been modifying the way that upgrades are handled in recent months. But 6.0 has finally been released — fully 10 months after 5.7.1.
