Messaging On Your Terms
I've long believed that electronic communication rarely aligns with human communication. Simplistically, the sender controls the message content and delivery media. The recipient has no power -- unless she chooses to reply (and is transformed into the sender).
New media and traditional media are partnering to give content and delivery control to the recipient.
Yesterday, I found a link reference to Feed Crier in Micro Persuasion. (See Introducing Feed Crier for more information.)
Feed Crier uses your instant messenger service as the delivery media for your RSS feeds. This is similar to how FeedBlitz delivers your RSS feeds to your email account. When used with RSS, delivery service models like Feed Crier and FeedBlitz give the recipient control of what content she wants to receive and the media (or channel) through which she wants to receive it.
Here's a few examples:
- You subscribe to your CEO's internal company blog. You want to know immediately when the CEO has posted a new entry. Therefore, you choose to deliver your CEO's blog feed to your IM service, e.g., AIM or Yahoo! Messenger. Each new entry appears on your desktop in an IM message window.
- You subscribe to an industry e-newsletter that is RSS-enabled. It often publishes articles with information relevant to your job. You decide to deliver the new articles to your email account, which you normally check several times a day.
- You subscribe to a number of blogs in which you have an interest, but perhaps not the desire or the time to read daily. You may also want to keep these entries segmented in an orderly manner so that you can refer back to them. Therefore, you subscribe through your RSS reader. Where new entries are delivered is a function of how your RSS reader is configured.
"Messaging on your own terms" puts you, the recipient, in control of the content and the media by which the content is delivered to you.
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P.S. Go to "Subscription Options" on the right sidebar of E-Communications & Community to receive new entries through your RSS reader, email account or instant messenger.