by Charlene Li

As a parent, I've been privy to the burning question this holiday shopping season -- how do I get my hands on a Wii? I've had one for a while and can honestly say that it is by far the best console for a family with young kids. (Or even for a family where the only kids in the household are the adults!)

The reality is, Wiis will be nearly impossible to find before the holidays given the overwhelming demand and lack of supply. So unless you're willing to pay a 2X premium on eBay or Amazon, you're out of luck. But I have a family friend who is an expert on finding Wiis using a variety of technologies and techniques -- and I thought I'd share some of his techniques with you.

So herewith are my top ten ways on how to score a Wii in the next week or so, both online and in brick & mortar stores. (Shameless plug: I also have one on eBay as a charity auction.)

=====Online Approaches=====

1) Read Fat Wallet. Fat Wallet has an excellent discussion forum that talks about Wii availability. The very first page has some good general information on online/mobile alerts and general availability. Go all the way to the last listed page (it was #581 when I posted) to find the latest buzz. West Coast folks can really benefit, especially on Sunday mornings when some stores release Wiis. This is the groundswell at its best -- supporting each other on the search for that elusive Wii.

2) Use Wiialerts.com and be near a PC. This service sends SMS/Text messages to your phone when an online store has Wiis in stock. For example, Amazon listed Wiis at 10:20pm PT on November 30th and were sold out within 12 minutes. So it pays to be fast, and connected.

3) If you're always online, use XPBargains.com. This site has a Wii Locator that is regularly updated. The trick is getting notified. A few approaches: 1) Use their RSS feed;  2) Use a Firefox plug-in called Check4Change which refreshes the page every 15 seconds and sends a desktop pop-up when something changes on the site. Highlight the first four lines of the listings and C4C will tell you when the status changes; and 3) Set up a desktop alert via Klipfolio -- XPBargains has a tutorial on how to do this.

4) Buy Wii Bundles. I've noticed that online sites like Wal-Mart (thanks to XPBargains) often have Wii bundles with accessories and games, which can cost +$500. If you're intent on getting a console soon, you're going to be paying that much for just the console alone through sellers one eBay/Amazon. You'll also need extra remots/nunchucks and games anyway, so you may as well buy the bundle. Don't like the games? Retailers like Wal-mart appear to be willing to exchange the games, and you may even be able to return them.

=====Offline Approaches=====

5) Use Salescircular.com to plan offline excursions. This is great because it breaks down the Sunday newspaper circulars by geography and then by product. So I can check California listings for Wiis across all retailers on one page. In general, if a retailer advertises it, they have to have a least a few Wiis on hand. The reality is that it could be 2, it could be 50. You just never know.

6) Set your alarm clock. People are getting desperate out there -- Fat Wallet reported Black Friday-like crowds out there this Sunday morning. Your best bet is to head to stores with early opening hours, like ToysRUs. Plan to get there 2-4 hours ahead of time. Some stores hand out vouchers before opening -- which means you can go home, head to Denny's for breakfast, etc. and come back later in the day to pick up you Wii. Be sure to bring your laptop if you have wireless access -- you'll want to continually check Fat Wallet for access. (Besides, it will keep you warm too!)

7) Recruit at least one other person to go with you, and then Twitter/SMS. If decide to go out for an early morning hunt, then try to find someone else to go out with you. Take separate cars so that you can go to separate stores to check out the situation. Ask the person at the front of the line what the status is -- they will usually tell you if vouchers have been given out, how many units are available. Then text or Twitter your teammates and head off to the next store on your list. Note: If you get there after a friend, don't cut in line! You wouldn't like it someone who was #5 in line suddenly had 4 buddies stroll up an hour before opening, ruining your chances. Do not tempt the ire of Wii-feverish parents!

8) Don't give up too early. You get there with 20 people ahead of you in line. They tell you that employees have shared they have only 20 Wiis in stock. Don't leave yet! On Black Friday, I was at a GameStop in Stockton with family members who were 35 or so in line when only 20 Wiis were available. They didn't hand out vouchers, so they stood in line for an hour. As they snaked up to the front, people were leaving with only a game or two in hand, bypassing the chance to buy a Wii. Two family members got the last two Wiis. So you never know.

9) Rely on the kindness of strangers and by kind to store employees. In many ways, the success of the groundswell -- both online and offline -- is that strangers are so willing to help each other when they are united by a quest, especially when you're standing at 5am outside a store. Bring a thermos of coffee -- and extra cups. Offer to hold places in line for each other for Starbucks breaks. And best of all, share and hear the stories of the people in line. There are other techniques, such as harassing store employees to tell you what time deliveries are made -- don't bother. They can't/won't tell you because of security reasons and frankly, many don't know. And they often have to stand in the very same lines you do to get their Wiis.

=====Shameless Plug=====

10) Buy the Wii I have up for charity auction. I braved the crowds on Black Friday and was first in line at a GameStop that morning, so snagged a Wii. My goal - to sell the Wii on eBay for the Ngererit School in Kenya that my husband and I support. We visited it 5 years ago and were struck by the desperate need for a new building.  So if you're going to just go ahead and buy a Wii at a premiumn anyway, I hope you'll consider buying this unit as the profits go towards funding a school, rather than into someone's pocket.   

by Charlene Li

You may have noticed that the tag line for this blog has changed – a key goal is to help people do their jobs better, to “win” so to speak with social technologies.

To that end, I thought you’d like to know about a few upcoming boot camps Forrester is running. These events are different from large scale conferences – they are typically 1-2 Forrester analysts with a small group of participants, usually around 20 people. We spend an entire day discussing the strategy and tactics needed to win with new technologies. And I personally love the format because it’s a great way for me to immerse myself in the day to day issues that people are facing.

So here are a few highlights of upcoming boot camps – there is also a complete list of all boot camps being offered. I hope you can join us, and please contact me if you have any questions.

Emerging Interactive Marketing Channels Boot Camp
Wednesday, March 21, 2007 in Cambridge, MA 
Analysts: Brian Haven & Christine Overby

This Boot Camp will introduce new marketing channels and provide techniques for successfully exploring and leveraging the marketing opportunities that each offers. Marketers will learn how to determine if each channel is right for their brand and develop a plan for how to get started.

This Boot Camp will include:
•    Interactive sessions covering how consumers have adopted each channel, how marketers use each channel today, and how to best leverage each to target consumers.
•    Sessions covering rich media (video, podcasting, gaming), user-generated content, social media (social networks, wikis, widgets, tagging, etc.), word-of-mouth marketing, mobile marketing, and others.
•    Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public      relations firms have used these emerging marketing channels.

Social Computing Boot Camp: Tapping Into The Power Of Connect Consumers
Tuesday, April 10, 2007 in Miami, Florida
Analysts: Charlene Li & Brian Haven

New technologies like blogs, social networking, and RSS are changing the media and marketing landscape. This Boot Camp will not only introduce these new tools, it will also move you quickly into being an active participant in social media and marketing. You'll go home with a better understanding of how to use social marketing — and more importantly, a workable plan for what to do today. Marketers will learn when it is appropriate to use these tools, how to overcome internal resistance to deployment, and how to measure the results.

This Boot Camp will include:
•    Interactive sessions on consumer adoption and behaviors toward blogs, RSS, social networking,      word-of-mouth marketing, and podcasting.
•    Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public relations firms have used social marketing — and how to avoid the pitfalls.
•    Hands-on training on how to create blogs and RSS feeds, as well as podcasts. In addition to a      technical overview, the training will include best practices on how to manage the internal process of setting up these social marketing tools.
•    A best practices panel of marketers, agencies, and technology providers.

Blogging Fundamentals: Building A Business Strategy
Friday, April 13, 2007 in Miami, Florida
Analysts: Charlene Li & Brian Haven

Blogs are evolving quickly as a communication medium and influencing the development of communications and marketing strategy. With more than 27 million blogs being written today, it is impossible not to find a niche community that can influence customer perceptions of a brand.

As customers increasingly tune out traditional advertising and turn to new communication channels to fill the void, companies must learn how to join in the conversation. Moreover, besides connecting companies and their customers, blogs are also becoming an invaluable collaboration tool within companies to facilitate knowledge management and cross-functional communications.

This Boot Camp will focus on the fundamentals of blogging from a corporate perspective, helping companies develop a blog strategy and implementation plan, including discussion of policy, technology, and process. It will have a heavy focus on hands-on exercises that will complement in-depth presentations on these issues.

My colleague (and book co-author) Josh Bernoff is at DEMO 07 this week covering the happenings there on our book blog. In four different posts, he provides quick reviews (done in real time) of 33 companies. It's quite the feat!!

Some things that caught my eye from Josh's posts (see the individual posts for Josh's take on these companies):

From Post #1: Worklight: Secure RSS for the enterprise that pulls information out of enterprise applications. This sounds very much like what KnowNow does with its RSS/alert service. Josh also saw a product called Reqall from Qtech that turns phone messages into text and delivers it via email. Reminds me of another start-up, Jott that does almost exactly the same thing.

From Post #2: Josh has a short-hand way of thinking about the widgets/gadgets someone can insert into Web pages like MySpace -- he calls it "MySpace furniture" which is very appropriate. I can build and insert these widgets into my page, arrange them to my liking, and invite my "friends" over to check it out.

In one afternoon at DEMO, Josh saw five companies that fits this definition: panjea.tv, Yodio, VUVOX, Splashcast, and MixPro. I've used several Web page widgets like these and while each offering has it's cool, neat spin, I can't help but feel that this is turning quickly into the "me too" category in much the same way that photo sharing sites are variations on the same theme. Just how much traction can any player get?

From Post #3: At the end of the post, Josh raises two questions about new mobile applications like BUZ Interactive and Jyngle:

The main question is 1) are the mobile operators going to allow, encourage, or block any of these, and 2) how will the user determine what's actually useful to him or her?

From Post #4: (As I'm reading the last post from Josh, I have to wonder how he's doing it -- I'm tired just reading his posts!) Lots of good stuff here -- groups get more firepower with CircleUp and Nexo, but I have to wonder if they will be pushed aside once Yahoo! redesigns Yahoo! Groups.

ZoomInfo caught Josh's eye because of it's core and expanded people search capabilities. I've been following ZoomInfo for quite a while and it's good to see them at DEMO (disclosure: I did a Webinar for them last February on the future of online recruitment.)

Lastly, Helium joins players like gather.com, agoravox.fr, and associatedcontent.com to pay contributors of user-generated content for their work, based on how much traffic and advertising views they generate. Helium's twist: it ranks the comments and articles based on what users find the most interesting, relevant, and helpful.

Just a quick note to let you know about Forrester's new RSS feeds. Previously, we had three feeds (which are still available): All of our research, just IT-oriented research, and just business-oriented strategy research.

Users now can create their own customized feeds, based not only on specific, pre-determined categories but also by keywords (so you can choose a technology, company name, or even analyst). The benefit: You'll get exactly what you want in your RSS feed.

I think this is the future of RSS feeds -- instead of subscribing to multiple feeds from the same company (for example, NYTimes.com has a half dozen feeds I'd like to subscribe to, but the content often overlaps and duplicates) I'd have a single feed that I can customize. Apple has a great iTunes Music Store customized RSS feed generator and VMWare's news feed (provided by SimpleFeed) combines different types of content together into one feed.

One thing to watch: each of these feeds could be potentially picked up by feed search engines like Bloglines. One solution is the proposed "no index" flag that was proposed at a RSS roundtable last December.  This will become a bigger and bigger issue as marketing services providers like Silverpop bring along their email marketing clients into the RSS world. In a recent discussion with Silverpop, they made the wise suggestion that marketers should start with delivering individualized feeds from the start, even if those feeds all contain the same information. The rationale is you can actually track and measure individual feeds, an approach advocated by Syndicate IQ.

If you have ideas or examples of customized RSS feeds, please send them along to me or post as a comment below.

We just published a new report, "Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What To Do About It" (available to clients only, but it's getting some good distribution as I'm getting pinged about it left and right). Here's the Executive Summary:

"Easy connections brought about by cheap devices, modular content, and shared computing resources are having a profound impact on our global economy and social structure. Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies. To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists."

Forrester defines social computing as "A social structure in which technology puts power in communities, not institutions." We also believe that three tenets define social computing:

1) innovation will shift from top-down to bottom-up;
2) value will shift from ownership to experience; and
3) power will shift from institutions to communities?

Now, this sounds all simplistic and theoretical, but I think there's a great deal of power in the idea of social computing. With full respect to the definition of Web 2.0, I believe that the concept of social computing is the underpinning of much of the pain that companies are feeling around new technologies like blogging and RSS. But as I often stress, it's not about the technologies but about the new relationships that users will form. Technologies will come and go, but the power built on the relationships created by social computing will endure.

To fully appreciate the value of social computing, companies have to let go of control. That means letting customers control the brand if you're a marketer, and it means enabling new enterprise tools that IT can't easily control to attract and support employees with high social computing needs. In many ways, this is the source of the great distress that I routinely hear from corporate managers.

The goal of the report is to be the foundation piece for a key area of research for Forrester. So if you've had a chance to read the report, I'd love to hear what you think of it.

My colleague, Charlie Golvin, covers the consumer wireless space and participated in the Google Personalzied Home for mobile briefing with me today. He offers the following thoughts on the service and asks for your thoughts as well:.

The mobile Internet is a different experience from the PC Internet — as it should be. The applications tend to fall into one of two categories:

• Information with a short half life (think stock alert or ebay outbid notice);
• Time killers (think Tetris or a 3 minute Daily Show clip).

Google looks to have done a good job of addressing some of the shortcomings in the first category, because your personalized home page — configured on your desktop, not your phone — is something you can arrange to have the resources that provide the information you know you’re likely to need when you’re on the go (like Charlene’s RSS feed). And also because they’ve streamlined the delivery of that information, ensuring that the delay between clicking on Google and getting the information you want is as short as possible (to the extent they can influence that).

Finally, they’ve chosen the platform that allows them to reach as many consumers as possible with the lowest barrier — xHTML browsers. This last point is in stark contrast to Yahoo!, which is limited to some Nokia Series 60 devices today and requires a somewhat convoluted download and installation process on some of them (like my 7610). Down the road Yahoo! will bear much higher development costs to reach their broad audience.

But will it make a difference? Will Yahoo! or MSN loyalists who have invested in personalizing their experience invest time in doing likewise at Google because the resultant mobile experience is so much better? I think the answer is no — for the real loyalists. But for those whose investment is lower and who don’t mind doing a quick setup of a personal page in order to make the mobile Internet more useful, sure. Charlene’s willing to do it just to get her RSS feeds more efficiently, but my use will be more of a flirtation before I go back to Yahoo! What do you think?

Just got off the phone with Deep Nashir, product manager for Google mobile products. Google just made its personalized home page accessible on mobile devices with an XHTML-capable Web browser. The announcement of Google Personalized Home and details for a Web-enabled demo are below.

Deep had three reasons for why they did this:

1) the phone is a very personal device, so the experience on the phone should be personal. 

2) they figured out a way so that network latency issues are minimized.

3) all of the information is available on the home screen -- you can quickly see how many emails are in Gmail, what the weather is, and your top RSS feeds. Deep positioned this as vastly different from Yahoo! Go Mobile, where information is still a click (and wait) away. Also, Yahoo! Go requires a download while the new Google service is available with just the browser

Interestingly, Google sets the default order of the content, and when asked whether user could customize the ordering, Deep said cryptically, "That feature is not available today," which implies that it will soon be. 

My take: finally, an easy way to get my RSS feeds on my Blackberry! I'll be setting up my Google personalized page primarily for mobile reading. This is a new habit of mine -- depending on where I read my RSS content, I want different configurations of different content. For example, I have ALL of my feeds coming into FeedDemon, which I use as a backup. I then read all of my backlogged feeds (aka non-priority feeds) when I'm traveling and offline. There are my regular feeds that I get through both Bloglines and Google Sidebar (again I use Bloglines as a backup because I can read it anywhere, Sidebar because it's easy and accessible at all times). And now, I'll add some crucial must reads to my Google page for my mobile information needs.

Here's the announcement:

Today, Google continued the expansion of its mobile offerings with the announcement of Google Personalized Home for mobile devices, a new service that enables users’ access to their personalized Google homepage on their mobile phones and PDAs.  With Personalized Home, users on-the-go can view the information they access most frequently from one screen on their mobile device.  For example, business travelers can easily keep up with their personal stock quotes while they're on the road, and news junkies can stay on top of their favorite headlines when they're away from their desktops and TVs - all without having to search multiple web pages from a mobile device.

Google Personalized Home provides at-a-glance access to information such as Gmail, customized news headlines, local weather, stock updates, hand-picked RSS feeds and more.  Information is optimized for the smaller screens and slower bandwidth of most mobile devices and is presented in a format that reduces the need to click multiple links.

Users who have already setup a personalized Google homepage on their PC can simply visit http://www.google.com through the web browser of their mobile device, select the "Personalized Home" link, and then sign in with their Google account username and password.  The next time they visit google.com on their phone, they will automatically see the same customized content modules that are featured on the web version of their Google personalized homepage. (Users who do not yet have a personalized Google homepage on their PC should first visit http://www.google.com/ig from their desktop computer and select the content to be added to their homepage.)

Google Personalized Home is currently available for free to mobile users in the U.S. and works with any phone that contains an XHTML-capable web browser.  Users should check with their carriers on their data service plan to determine if there are additional charges for web access.

For more information about Google Personalized Home, please visit http://mobile.google.com/personalized/.

Yahoo! announced that it will be extending its current RSS capabilities in two areas:

1)      Yahoo! Alerts will now be RSS enabled. This means that when a new item is posted to a feed, a Yahoo! user can have the post be sent as an Alert to email, Yahoo! Messenger, or via SMS to a mobile phone. So I can now add an RSS feed, like a search on Yahoo! News for mentions of my name, as an Alert and have it delivered in the channel of my choice. This will be great for those Craig's List RSS feeds where it's a competitive advantage to find out about hot items like tickets or apartments quickly.

2)      The new Yahoo! Mail beta will also be RSS enabled. Users can add feeds directly into the Mail interface, or if they have feeds already set up in My Yahoo!, they will automatically replicate within Mail. Each post acts like an individual email – it can be forwarded, sorted into folders, and deleted. I’ve included a screenshot from my Mail account.

In my conversation with Scott Gatz from Yahoo!, he emphasized that Yahoo!’s goal is to integrate RSS access anywhere it makes sense, and to integrate it into experiences they already know.

I’m thrilled! I’ve long wanted to have my RSS feeds integrated in with email, but the plug-ins from players like NewsGator and Attensa mess up my Outlook in a terrible way. This has more to do with the way Forrester has set up Outlook than with the vendors’ software and services – I know many happy, satisfied users of both of those products.

The integration into Mail is an obvious improvement over MyYahoo! – it’s where people already spend a lot of time gathering and sharing information, and more importantly, it’s a familiar interface. One of my biggest problems with RSS is just remembering to go and read it – starting up FeedDemon or browsing over to Bloglines just doesn’t work that well for me. Even Google Sidebar doesn’t get used that much anymore because I find I have to frequently minimize it to use common work applications like our CRM system or Webex.

And good news on the Yahoo! Mail beta – Yahoo! said that they would be starting to pull people off the waiting list “soon” and “slowly”. So if you haven’t already, sign up for the beta!

Update: Lots of posts around but for the inside scoop direct from Yahoo!, listen to John Furrier's PodTech Network interview with Scott Gatz and Ethan Diamond about the announcement. A great use of podcasting technology.

I spoke a few weeks ago at Forrester's Consumer Forum event in NYC about how companies can tap into social computing. I've included the links below to the MP3 and video files (they are FREE!!!), along with several other relevant speeches and Q&A that I thought you'd be interested in. I've included a few summaries as well as the lengths. [Note: the videos aren't quite "videos" (at least, not on my connection), but you'll get the slides that accompany the speeches -- and also a view of me "walking" around the stage!]. Also included are interviews with Paul Tagliabue, Commissioner of the NFL, Greg Joswiak, VP of Worldwide Product Marketing for iPod, Apple Computer Digital Home, and Vyomesh Joshi, EVP of the Imaging and Personal Systems Group at HP.

Charlene Li: "Social Computing -- Bubble or Big Deal?" (29 min. 38 sec.)
Find out how companies can tap into new technologies such as blogs, RSS, viral marketing, and podcasting to develop deeper relationships with consumers — including five rules that companies should follow to successfully grow these new relationships.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=88

Chris Charron: "Innovating In A Consumer Driven World" (8 min. 43 sec.)
Companies must tap into the power of consumer-to-consumer communication by adopting a "consumer-focused innovation" approach in which consumers play an active role in products, services, experience design, and marketing.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=86

Christine Overby: "The Essentials Of Consumer-Driven Innovation" (20 min. 11 sec.)
To turn consumer insights into profits, companies must master "consumer-focused innovation" — in which consumers play an active role in products, services, experience design, and marketing.
http://www.cramereventmedia.com/videoviews/videoView.aspx?videoViewID=87

I have a confession to make. I may research and write about RSS, but darn it if I can’t remember to actually check my feeds! It’s just not part of my daily habit and after trying about 20 different aggregators, I have yet to find one that 1) works with the Forrester laptop configuration; 2) that I actually use on a daily basis.

That is, until now. Enter Google Sidebar. This is the new extension of Google’s Desktop Search offering – it’s a panel that sits on your desktop and provides a single source of personalized information (like news, weather, stocks, and yes, RSS feeds). Think of it as a personalized portal, but one that lives outside of a Web page (no need to have to surf over to my.yahoo.com or my.msn.com – this application is just THERE!).

A quick glance lets me see recent feeds – no need to have to start another application or open a browser window. Even aggregators embedded into Outlook didn’t do the trick for me as I spend only a portion (albeit, a large portion) of my time there.

What I find interesting is that Sidebar acts like one really big widget – and additional plug-ins are available, similar to what Yahoo’s Konfabulator and Apple’s Dashboard offer. While I’m a big widget fan, there was one major problem with them – I never see my desktop (it’s usually buried under umpteen windows). There are only a few plugins available today – but I’ve already found the “To Do” plugin useful. And I’m really looking forward to getting the eBay Sidebar plugin which is under development!

There are just two things to point out about Sidebar. First, the new search query box in Sidebar provides “search as you type” functionality, albeit, it’s a bit delayed compared to other desktop search applications like Yahoo! Desktop Search and Copernic. In keeping with the "no browser" philosophy, the search query box allows you to look at the initial results quickly and to go directly to that file or email.

Second, when I downloaded Sidebar and used it for the first time, I was struck by how similar it is to MSN’s Dashboard, which MSN has included as part of its Premium access service Internet software (click on “Custom Tools” to learn more – I’ve also included a screenshot from my archives). One of my favorite features of Dashboard was the ability to “pin” it anywhere on the desktop. Granted, there are a lot more advanced features in Sidebar AND it’s more configurable. But MSN introduced this technology in 2002!! They had the foresight to develop it years ago but kept it tucked away in a hidden part of its offerings. Look for them to quickly dust off the covers and make it available forthwith.

Lastly, I've been asked if this will Sidebar and it's inevitable market followers will speed along RSS adoption. There's no doubt in my mind that it will. Making RSS readily accessible AND visible puts it top of mind and spurs usage, which will drive adoption.

Google now has the ability to add RSS/Atom feeds from Google News. Users will have the ability to add three types of feeds: 1) Google News section feed; 2) Google News search results feed; and 3) feed from a customized news page. Interestingly, Google offers two feed options, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 (I believe, in a nod to their ongoing support of the Atom standard).

Yahoo! News has had a similar feature for quite a while now, although it doesn’t allow users to add a feed of their customized news page. But Yahoo! does make it very easy to add news sections and search result feeds to My Yahoo! – Google still requires you to manually copy and paste the feed URL into its personalized home page service, although I expect that this will change shortly. Ask Jeeves also has feeds from news, but only for categories, while MSN has RSS feeds coming from its general search results (which interestingly, I nudged the freshness index within SiteBuilder to return listings that have been added most recently to the index – check out the feed I created on a search for “discovery landing”.)

So with almost every other major player doing this, it was about time that Google followed suit. From our research, we found that RSS users are news junkies, with 43% of all adult RSS users in the US visit a national news site at least once a week, compared to just 14% of non-RSS using online adults that do the same.

We just released two new reports on RSS for marketers: "RSS 101 For Marketers" and "Using RSS As A Marketing Tool". A special thanks to everyone who contributed marketer examples -- you can see many of them in the comments of this post.

One point that's sure to catch attention is the number of people using RSS -- our Technographics survey of 68,000 North American households showed that only 2% of all online households were "using RSS". Now here's the caveat -- that doesn't include all the people who may be using RSS (for example, through My Yahoo!) and don't realize it. Young consumers between the ages of 12-21 were more likely to be using RSS -- 5% of online young consumers say they use RSS.

The second report has detailed best practices on how marketers can create effective RSS feeds for marketing purposes. There are four steps I outline: 1) Determine what content to distribute via RSS; 2) Build the feeds; 3) Market the feeds; and 4) Measure the feeds -- and their impact.

Below are excerpts of the reports:

RSS 101 for Marketers: In Forrester's February 2005 Marketer Online Survey, 57% of marketers said that they were interested in using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) as a marketing channel. Why the interest when just 2% of North American online adults use RSS? The combination of reduced email marketing effectiveness and growing consumer advertising backlash drives marketers to test RSS — from creating their own feeds to putting ads into RSS feeds themselves. This report introduces who uses RSS in North America and the implications of RSS adoption. The second report in the series looks at best practices for marketers using RSS.

Using RSS As A Marketing Tool: Despite its resemblance to the Wild West, best practices for how marketers can use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) are already emerging. In this second of two reports, Forrester outlines why marketers should experiment with RSS, especially marketers with customers who fit the profile of early RSS adopters. Even if it's something as simple as putting press releases in an RSS feed, marketers will benefit from early exposure to distributing information via RSS — and receive valuable feedback from key constituents on what types of content they would like to have.

I’ve been on a plane all day (I’m now in hot, muggy Boston) and have been itching to write about Konfabulator’s acquisition by Yahoo!. I’ve been using Konfabulator for the past few months (since I’m not on an Apple) and have been tinkering with a few of the widgets. Widgets are little mini-applications that have primarily one purpose – to get for example, a mosquito report or reports your latest feedback rating on eBay. So why would I want a whole bunch of little things cluttering my desktop? That’s exactly what I was asking as I’ve been adding and deleting widgets the past few weeks!

The problem is I already know what the ultimate widget would be me – something that would get me up and out the door in the mornings. I’d pull together a weather widget, calendar widget, traffic widget and to do widget into one nice neat little app, and then feed it with all of the RSS data streams that I deem relevant. There’s only one small problem -- I don’t know JavaScript! So I am at the mercy of app developers who I hope will take pity on my discombobulated mornings and write the darn app!

But why should I have to wait for developers to do this? This is where I think Yahoo! gets very, very interesting with Konfabulator. As a developer tool, it may have some interesting potential for developing neat interfaces into Yahoo!’s vast stores of content and information. But if Yahoo! can put the power of widget creation into the hands of end-users, it would give us end users the power to not only create custom content streams a la RSS and MyYahoo!, but also allow us to filter, distribute, and combine that data in any way we see fit. There’s already precedence for this in the enterprise space, where JotSpot has taken wikis and built applications on top of classic wiki infrastructure. Proposed RSS extensions from Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. will provide additional structure around which widgets can be built – think shopping alerts.

And even if I never get around to writing the ultimate, personal application, I bet there is someone out there who’s also a busy, working mom/dad AND has some JavaScript skills who wrote a similar program for themselves and shares it in the Widget Gallery. And how about setting up a marketplace where I could write out the specs for my custom widget and put it out for bid?

So this is more than just about little widgets - I think it's potentially taking the power of application development out of the hands of "big" companies. Think of it as open source for the masses.

You can download and try out Konfabulator, which has already been renamed Yahoo! Widgets at widgets.yahoo.com.

Microsoft announced that it would be doing the following:

1)      Build auto-discovery into Internet Explorer 7;

2)      Provide support for RSS within Longhorn so that developers don’t have to worry about technical details like data stores or synchronization;

3)      Provide a list of RSS extensions that would be available under Creative Commons.

The first announcement is pretty straight forward – the new IE7 beta is due out this summer will have all sorts of nice features like tabbed browsing (already available for IE6 via MSN Toolbar) as well as auto discovery.

I’ve been asked this several times in the past few days – what happens to all of the small aggregator players now that Microsoft/Longhorn is in the market? Well, it wasn’t as if they weren’t expecting it! Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon, said in an interview with eWeek that he thought the Microsoft announcement was a blessing – and he echoes exactly what Dean Hachamovitch, GM of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, said to me last week. This is because the second announcement – that Longhorn will support RSS – will make the mechanics of working with feeds much easier. As Dean said to me, “This takes the complexity away and allows the developer to think instead about the experience.

That’s where the third announcement comes in – the extensions allow RSS to become a basic transport layer for information, extending far beyond the content that’s currently available from news sites and blogs. You’ve already seen it in some of the examples that were submitted in response to my post – some of my favorites are RSS Calendar and appcasting FlickrExport. This means that rather than wait for some sort of miracle product that can tie together my work Outlook calendar, my family calendar on Yahoo!, and the school calendar of events, I can simply subscribe to their structured feeds and port them into the calendaring app of my choice.

So taken in whole, the Microsoft announcement is fairly sweeping – it will do the basic block and tackle work of working with feeds, allowing developers to build neat little applications, that in turn users will find with their long-awaited new IE browsers.

What’s not to like? Well, the usual suspects in the RSS format wars have claimed that Microsoft is creating yet another fork -- and those of us who still can’t for the life of us figure out the differences between RSS 2.0 and Atom don’t give a hoot. From my point of view, I’m much more interested in seeing what content publishers – which will hopefully include some of my favorite merchants like Talbot’s – will do with the new extensions so that developers will be able to write applications on top of those structured feeds.

Microsoft will be making an announcement at Gnomedex on Friday about how they will integrate RSS into their products. I've been briefed and am under embargo until after their speech Friday morning. But Dave Winer spilled the beans. And Robert Scoble gives a few more hints that the announcement goes beyond just the browser. I thought you'd like to know so that you can follow the story -- the best way to do this is to watch the IE blog Channel 9.

One of the things Dave points out in his post is the realization that RSS is more than just about news. As you know, I've been working on a report about non-blog uses of RSS for marketers (it's in the final stages, really!) and as part of the research, had a wide-ranging discussion with Dean Hachamovitch, GM of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team. I'll have more details on what the announcement means Friday afternoon.

• I’m doing a research project on how marketers can/should use RSS and am looking for any non-blog related uses of RSS. For example, Purina has RSS feeds for updated Web content (e.g. dog and cat care advice), and coupon or bargain sites like Slick Deals and TechBargains also have RSS feeds of their sites’ content.

Ideally, I’d like to find examples of marketers using RSS as a substitute/alternative to email newsletters, or using RSS as a way to ensure deliverability of information or promotions.

Feel free to post the examples in comments below, or email me if you’d prefer to share the information only for background purposes.

I just came back from a great networking dinner hosted by Kevin Werbach as a pre-pre Supernova get-together. You can see a preliminary guest list – there were well over 150 people at the confab.

The evening had a certain 1999-esque flair but with a big difference – we each had to pony up $20 for the Thai food (which by the way, was very tasty!). And it was a cash bar!

But it was worth every cent – I mentioned to Kevin that I got more done in a few hours than I usually do in a couple of days! To which Marc Cantor replied, “That’s what networking is for.”

A couple of highlights – at least the ones that I’m allowed to talk about (one of the highlights of the evening was hearing about all of the stealth developments going on…it’s going to be an interesting couple of months).

- I met several of my BlogHer Conference advisory board members for the first time. It was like a reunion – we’ve all been communicating online it was great to finally meet each other.

-  Learning more about how to actually create podcasts. One of my tablemates was Steve Sloan, who has the interesting job of teaching the professors at San Jose State University how to use new technologies like podcasts. They’ve been podcasting there since last fall – everything from supporting “how to” tutorials that support the class curriculum to actual lectures.

- Speaking of podcasting, I ran into Deborah Schultz and Ian Kennedy from Six Apart and had only one, simple request – enable podcasting on Typepad. They already provide hosting services for Movable Type installations – it seems like it would be a fairly simple task to open up those servers to Typepad users. And I would pay for the service, just to make it easy (and I suspect many other wanna-be podcasters feel the same way). They both promised to look into it.

- I also ran into Stuart Henshall, who is the editor of Skype Journal. Now here is an example of a blogging business model. The blog is maintained by a team of writers, has ads from Google, and also points users to all things Skype (equipment software). But Stuart told me that a growing part of his business is working with companies grappling with how to think about Skype – what the impact will be, if they should use it, and if so, how to deploy it. So using the blog to demonstrate thought leadership and then hiring oneself out. Very cool model.

- The best part was running into people like Tony Gentile and Jeff Clavier who are regular readers of this blog. I know people read this blog – I can see the stats. But it’s just a really cool feeling when I can put a name and face to a reader, especially those who have commented on the posts.

So it was a very fun, enjoyable evening and I expect that Kevin is planning another party – after all this was billed as the “pre-pre-Supernova” party. Can’t wait! And I expect that the Syndicate Conference next week will be very similar as about a quarter of the same people will be there.

Ask Jeeves announced this evening that they have acquired Bloglines, a Web-based service that aggregates, searches, publishes, and searches blogs and RSS feeds. I talked with Jim Lanzone, Sr. VP of Search Properties at Ask Jeeves, and Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, about the acquisition.

Mark said that Bloglines had been courted by several VCs and companies about being acquired, but wasn’t swayed by any of them until they started talking to Ask Jeeves. It was apparent from Jim’s tone that he personally is a huge fan and user of Bloglines. It helps for management to be in love with an acquisition target’s service!

During the interview, Jim said one thing that struck me. “It [Bloglines] is a doorway, not a destination, and in this way, is very similar to search.” Similar to it’s acquisitions last year of portals like iWon and Excite, Ask Jeeves is quickly assembling a portfolio of Web properties that in aggregate would account a significant share of online users (in some ways, it feels like Barry Diller’s IAC companies).

I think this acquisition is a win-win for both companies, because:

1)    Ask gets one of the top RSS aggregators in the market – a coup for a company that is often characterized as an also-ran. That’s a lot of quality users and traffic with which Ask Jeeves can build a business (as in “monetize”, which some folks in the blogosphere think is a dirty word – more on that below). Bloglines employees and users may be discouraged that they are being bought by Ask, but my experience is that the company is highly innovative – they have been right in the middle of the fray with desktop search and personalized search. A new marketing blitz later year should help with the repositioning and owning Bloglines will help burnish Ask Jeeves image.

2)    Ask also gets access to a large database of archived blogs and feeds, which will help its overall search efforts. Other search engines like Technorati and Feedster are better known, but in the hands of Ask Jeeves, blog search could actually become a strategic tool for the new entity, rather than just be a way to find feeds (which is the main way it appears to be used on Bloglines today). Mark Fletcher said that “world class blog search doesn’t exist yet”, which sounds like a direct challenge to not only these specialized players but also to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. The Bloglines team will be moved to Ask’s Los Gatos facilities, which also houses their MyJeeves and Desktop Search teams – which will be essential as the two services begin their integration. Most intriguing possibility – leveraging Blogline’s Share features to turbo charge search personalization.