Leuk online mediabudget VOR

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Leuk, zo’n online mediabudget voor volvooceanrace.com:

Volvo is spending £ 750,000 on phases two and three of a web marketing campaign to promote the Volvo Ocean Race and its sponsorship of the event.

Maar dan zou je toch verwachten dat dit sjieke mediabureautje wel een (paar) RSS-feed(s) zou adviseren… maar nee hoor! Terwijl ik ze toch al een keer of wat van gr´tis, professioneel advies heb voorzien.

Open Letter to the VOR

Meerdere keren heb ik ze met onderstaand mailtje “gespamd”. Maar tot nu toe zonder resultaat, helaas. En zonder enige reactie, zelfs niet toen ik ‘m aan bijna iedereen van het MT stuurde. 😉

Nog één keertje dan, op deze site, als een soort “Open Letter to the VOR-organization”:

From: bas@lovefool.nl
To: anyone.listening@volvooceanrace.org
Subject: Newsfeed for your site
Originally sent: Oct 24, 2004; Dec 4, 2004

Dear Sirs,

During the previous race, I was probably one of the most frequent visitors of your website, www.volvooceanrace.org. And since the release of your new site for the upcoming event, I’ve enjoyed every article within days of publishing. I would like to suggest a small, but nonetheless great, improvement to the site.

RSS feeds!
An RSS feed is, simply put, a list of (news) items, in a structured form. Usually, each item contains a title, summary, and a link to a URL with the full article. RSS feeds by themselves don’t do much. If you view one in most browsers, you’ll see the raw XML, which is roughly human-readable, but intended for computer programs.

Personally, I use Bloglines.com for my daily dose of a huge number of feeds. And nowadays, millions of internet users have some means of reading RSS.

Why?
With an RSS feed, you would not only facilitate plenty of your current readers, but you could also be able to increase the amount of visitors, by syndicating content to other sites. Quite a few websites use RSS to display headlines from other websites, as it provides additional content to their readers.

How?
There are several standards of formatting a RSS feed. I would be very glad, and even slightly honoured, to help you set up a feed for your wonderful website, and make it work!

Show me!
For your viewing pleassures, I put together an example newsfeed, using a couple of your recent news items:
– leenders.info/zooi/vor/index.xml

You can get a preview of a user’s perception of this newsfeed in Bloglines:
– www.bloglines.com/public_display?…

With these examples, I hope to convince you of the usefulness of RSS for your website, as argued in the text above. Please do not hesitate to contact me for any questions on these matters.

Sincerely,

Bas
www.lovefool.nl

3 gedachten over “Leuk online mediabudget VOR”

  1. Dear Mr. Leenders,

    We are delighted by the interest you have shown in our web-site. More than 600 e-mails by you alone. Even our lawyers are getting restless now!

    The enhancements you have suggested are truly great… but they’re not very Volvo. Being a Volvo-owner yourself, you must be aware of the fact that we at Volvo are all about safety and entirely not about concepts like beauty, practicality or keeping-up-with-the-rest-of-the-world.

    You see, from what we understand from our experts, any technical enhancement we add to our site makes it more vulnerable to crashes. And crashes are a big no-no here at Volvo. Our lawyers are dead against them. That’s why we sponsor a boat race. Boats don’t crash; they sink. Sinking is fine. Because Volvo’s don’t sink. Except when they’re in the water… Maybe the boat race isn’t such hot plan after all, but that’s not the issue right now.

    So you might be wondering what we’re are going to spend that 750.000 pound media budget on, right? Safety, Mr. Leenders! Safety! We already have the beta-version of our site to start beep-beep-beeping when your head is getting to close to the monitor and right now we are looking into an airbag option. Safety is our – and your – life, Mr. Leenders. Our lawyers are very happy, you can imagine that.

    You’ll be thrilled to know, by the way, that these are the same Harvard-trained, battle-hardened lawyers that stand ready to sue the shirt off your back, should we get one more e-mail from you.

    Many thanks for your suggestions. Keep checking out our site and make sure to tell your friends about your safe web-surfing experience!

    Warmest regards,

    Knut Thorsson
    Director Volvo Marketing & Customer Relations

  2. Dear Knut,

    Thank you so much for your heart-warming reaction. I am very, very pleased to see that somewhere in your organisation, an forward looking engineer did in fact get it anyway. Despite of your army of lawyers and all your online safety regulations, a test version of your Newsfeed got out on the Big Bad Interweb and already had 3 subscribers on Bloglines.

    Your yet to be announced RSS feed currently has one subscriber (that would be me), as you can see in the Bloglines preview, and counting…

    Sincerely,

    Bas

  3. En, zo vind ik in de duidelijk nog niet officiële code van de feed, ze hebben zelfs een mooie uitleg over RSS erbij!

    Klein lulligheidje:

    Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, have functionality which automatically picks up RSS feeds for you. For more details on these, please check their websites.

    Oftewel: zoek het uit! Ik hoop dat ze dit nog wel even erectificeren door deze regel code aan iedere webpagina toe te voegen:

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.volvooceanrace.com/xml/articles.xml" />

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