Comments on: Infomart now monitoring blogs, still no RSS

By: "Canwest Papers and FPinfomart add RSS" from Canadian Public Relations Society

"Canwest Papers and FPinfomart add RSS" from Canadian Public Relations Society — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:45:00 +0000

[...] Back in January 07, I did a post on Capital PR about FPinfomart adding blogs to their media monitoring service. In it, I commented that FPinfomart and Canwest papers should also be offering RSS. [...]

By: "CanWest and FPinfomart Get With RSS" from Capital PR

"CanWest and FPinfomart Get With RSS" from Capital PR — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:41:14 +0000

[...] Back in January, I did a post about FPinfomart adding blogs to their media monitoring service. [...]

By: Keelan

Keelan — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 02:55:37 +0000

Agree.

I’m still surprised when I mention it to other PR/communications professionals (whether in an agency or inside an organization) and they don’t seem to know what I’m talking about.

Its a great tool that has really made my life a lot easier.

By: engtech

engtech — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 16:23:14 +0000

RSS is one of those things where once you start using it you wonder why everyone else doesn’t use it all the time.

Yet I still find that people who don’t blog themselves are very slow to adopt it.

By: Keelan

Keelan — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:29:54 +0000

CanWest/Infomart are in a catch 22 on this.

Infomart is basically a pre-RSS aggregator except you can only select to pull from the sources they offer. That is, you can select not to pull content from all their sources, but can’t add your own.

Its a business for CanWest. Annual, individual subscriptions to infomart are in the hundreds of dollars and organizations, particularly PR firms, often have several subscriptions. Compared to free aggregators or ones that charge a small one-time download fee of $30 or $40.

If CanWest papers begin to offer their content via RSS, Infomart will become redundant. The only reason I still use it is because you can’t effectively monitor CanWest papers any other way. Google RSS Search isn’t bad for this, but not 100% effective.

However, with IE7 having RSS built in, how much longer can CanWest papers avoid offering their web content via RSS?

I think if they want to squeeze a few more years out of Infomart in its current form, they should allow subscribers to receive content and their searches via RSS.

Otherwise, infomart needs to find some other way to add value. The blog monitoring was a nice attempt, but currently not effective. For example, this discussion about Infomart won’t get picked up by Infomart (not really a valid point given my blog is new, but it wouldn’t if we were having it on your blog either).

There is an opportunity for them to do more than just monitor blogs the same way as they monitor papers. If they could find a way to also track the comments, trackbacks, etc. that would be valuable.

By: David Jones

David Jones — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 12:40:07 +0000

Any step is a good step, I suppose. I saw this functionality on Infomart, but never even gave it a second thought as I personally have my own blog monitoring set up.

CNW is working hard to engage bloggers in the PR community to help them develop their capabilities as a newswire. I’ve had a brief discussion with CCN about improving their RSS capabilities as well, so at least there is movement.

Are you suggesting that infomart offer subscribers the ability to get alerts by RSS in a similar way as they get alerts by e-mail right now? Or are you looking for something more from them?