Fresh

We make it our job to stay abreast of cultural, social, economic and industry trends—things that influence us and, in turn, you. What's caught our eye lately? What kept us up last night? What can we not stop thinking about? Or looking at? Or dreaming of? Stuff like this ... 

• May07

  Feed Me

  Posted in Ideas by Arlo Guthrie Permalink

  ProActive creates experiences. Often, they foster a unified community, like our recent work with Thomson West. Sometimes, our client’s audience needs an individual experience, like what we did for Volkswagen.

  When creating the new ProActiveInc.com, we saw an opportunity to demonstrate our awareness and understanding of the cultural online experience and the instant community that can form around it. This became Fresh.

  We didn’t stop there. We made our content available as an RSS feed. You can get as much or as little content from us as you want by choosing a feed in the bottom right corner of every page. Also, when you see the  icon next to someone’s name in Fresh, you can exclusively subscribe to that person’s posts. (So if you like reading long-winded articles about esoteric internet technologies, subscribe to my feed.)

  But wait, what is an RSS feed, you ask?

  It is one of the technologies truly catalyzing the culture shift in the online experience. The story of RSS, or even what it stands for, is a complicated tale (Wikipedia’s take, if you’re interested). Think of RSS as your favorite beverage. The website is merely the drinking glass, the vessel from which you enjoy that refreshing drink.

  Using RSS, websites offer a feed. Hungry for your favorite website’s latest content, you subscribe to that feed. Every time the website adds new content, the RSS file is updated. Your computer periodically checks that RSS file, captures what's new and delivers it to you. Voilà.

  But why stop at one website? The technology truly shines when you subscribe to a variety of feeds, allowing you to receive all of the freshest content from all of your favorite sites, all in one place. Talk about an individual experience!

  How to subscribe? There are many options. All major web browsers now support RSS. Many email clients, like Outlook 2007 and Apple Mail, also support RSS so updated content appears like new email. Google offers Google Reader for online aggregation. NewsGator offers several stand-alone RSS readers, including some for mobile phones. 

  Remember our "RSS feed as your favorite beverage" metaphor? Now you can use any tumbler you want.

  Because an RSS feed provides raw content, it is easy to share. The sidebar widgets in WordPress offer users the option to include an RSS feed on their own website to display, for example, links from del.icio.us. Google Reader allows users to share RSS content with other Google Reader users.

  And then there are the mash ups, when users take feeds and reshape the content in new and unique ways. FriendFeed allows a user to collect content from all their social networking activities and turn it into one master feed. Twittervision takes the data from the popular microblogging service Twitter and displays where users are posting from on a map. Yahoo! Pipes uses a graphical interface that allows users to create their own mashups. Want an RSS feed of every article from The New York Times, BBC News, and The Washington Post that mentions “Burma?" Here it is, and it only took a few minutes to make.

  Before RSS feeds, web content was served in someone else’s drinking glass. Now you're the bartender, mixing favorites for yourself and your friends.

  ProActive strives to be at the forefront of what’s new in the experience business, and the online experience is no different. Subscribe to our feeds, and we’ll make sure that your feed reader of choice is always filled with fresh content.