Question about RSS feeds
 

Hey, I don't want to sound stupid here, but what (exactly) is the advantage of offering a webmaster RSS feeds? I know a little about them.

Can dumb it down for me and tell me why (how) they should work? What kind of content would they deliver?

I responded briefly to this on another board but in a nutshell, the advantage is automation for the webmasters. Thus far adult affiliate programs have only had very basic RSS feeds such as gallery feeds or blog feeds but the potential is much greater.

RSS feeds have much more powerful potential than stock standard promotional items. For example, we just released online model RSS feeds which allow affiliates to parse the online Webcams.com models & model profiles in real time so that they can have their own front end. This sort of thing works well for a webcam site because things are being updated constantly.

For basic paysites, an example might be having a feed for movies/pictures of the day where affiliates can parse the link to the most recent daily movie update to keep their site fresh.

If an affiliate does this with enough feeds, they could possibly have a completely automated site that has rich, unique content that surfers will actually want to come back to see.

I have found that RSS feeds can also get new domains spidered by major search engines in about 24-48 hours if submitted properly.

Spidered quickly, yeah, but dropped just as fast if the pages are just filled with RSS feeds.

Anyway, if sponsors started using RSS instead of emailing gallery links, that would save me alot of work.

Well, I wouldn't suggest having only RSS feeds...

An inbound link from a regularly updated blog works just as well. ;)

I don't mean to take this thread off track, but, how the fuck are you?! I haven't talked to you in years. I went to Chicago, I saw Old Style, but, I didn't drink it... My ICQ is the same. Hit me up.|waves|

Hey Spanky |waves|
Nice to see you are still around. Check your icq ;)

I added you to my ICQ|headbang|

Would be nice to have a all sorts of rotating galleries complete with description that update on a daily basis. Pretty much automates a site for a webmaster. webmaster only really needs to lay things out.

One way I see it working.

I was thinking about this the other day. We already provide rss feeds for promotional use, however i'd like to start doing feeds for webmaster updates as well, and will soon!

One drawback to offering RSS feeds to webmasters to use on their sites, could be alot of duplicate content.

Though as others mentioned, could be some very nice webmaster tools.

ronnie

we'll add a random=yes to our gallery and blog feeds so webmasters can have it sort dynamically if they'd like.. any other ideas anyone?

It would be nice if sponsors who provide RSS feeds, would inform affiliates of what their feed contains, before the affilliate adds it to a blog and finds out that it's nothing more than a bullshit list of galleries or *whoopdeedoo* linked thumbs.

That's exactly why I have an RSS news reader installed, so I can preview feeds before deciding whether to add them to my blog. I use Abilon, but there are a number of free ones out there.

The new version of IE that comes with Windows Vista is supposed to have a news reader built in.

That's true. You can use things like autoblogger to customize the RSS so it's not all dupe content though.