The RSS Soundbite

An interesting post from Dwight Shih:

Tim Bray is in sales mode and wants to know What’s the RSS Soundbite? My advice would be to load up NewsGator and pitch RSS as pull email. Email has already achieved pretty near universal acceptance in business. Many people consider their email archives to be their primary information storage vault — and the ones that don’t know people who do. So pitch RSS as broadcast email and don’t give the web a chance to confuse the issue.

I’ve been talking to a company who is thinking about this from the email marketing perspective. Now, normally the words “email” and “marketing” in the same sentence send a shiver down my spine (and terms like “opt-in” just make me laugh), but I can totally see this. If I could subscribe to a RSS feed that’s personalized for me, containing advertisements and offers of stuff I might actually be
interested in, based on information I’ve given, I’d be all over it. Not only would I read it, but I might even buy stuff from it. And it’s all under my control - if I decide I’m no longer interested, I just remove my subscription. Try that with email lists - heh.

So let’s recap. People are getting news in their mailbox with NewsGator. They’ve voluntarily subscribed to feeds they know contain advertising and offers. They’ve indicated the stuff they’re interested in. Advertisers buy space in these feeds, based on user interests and demographics. If I’m an advertiser, this seems extremely valuable. Seems good for everyone.

So what do you think? Would you subscribe to such a feed, personalized for you? I’m curious if I’m the only one who thinks this could be a good idea. :-)