RSS feeds, blogs and email

This looks interesting: on MediaPost’s Email Insider a feature on "Blog-To-E-mail May Change the World," was presented by Bill McCloskey, of Email Data Source and product Email Analyst. He says, "RSS Readers are dead-end. If it is not in the inbox, it won’t be read. Period."

He confirmed his views when he read an article on "TechCrunch.com about a new tool from FeedBurner that provided a blog to e-mail translator. It allows blogs to be syndicated and delivered in a nicely formatted HTML e-mail to the Inbox. And it suddenly dawned on me: RSS isn’t a great delivery vehicle. RSS is a great content development vehicle. From an end users perspective, they sign up just as they’d sign up at any e-mail newsletter opt-in. The content is delivered in an e-mail directly to their inbox. But from the content developers’ standpoint, they now have an easy-to-use content development platform that allows them to incorporate other RSS feeds into the body of the e-mail as well as provide links to blog comments and HTML graphics to support an advertising base.