Hi Raj,

Actually, so it's clear: my company is not an ESP and provides no services associated with deliverying of email. We are a data company that monitors the effectiveness marketing messages delivered by push. For now, that means Email, although we will be monitoring RSS, SMS, and other push marketing mechanisms as they come on board. Our job, as the first independant source of competitive intelligence for push, is to provide a non-biased view on the effectiveness of email (currently) and other forms marketing channels such as RSS when our clients ask for it.

Bill, thanks for clearing up my erroneous assumption.

Why is RSS always compared to newsletter type emails / or direct mail?!

Can we make the paradigm shift? and start thinking about RSS as more then a one-to-many news flooding system? As simple as it is, it still defines the data that is being syndicated. And that is a good thing. No, that is the best thing about RSS; that finally we have a simple standard that helps us share data, to who ever want to use it, for what ever reason. So comparing it to stuff you read in an inbox might not be the best way to compare, or determine its fate? perhaps it requires 3 more cycles of RSS aggregation and manipulation before we have something that is worth publishing as a RSS feed that is intended to be read like news or something you find in your inbox.

Bart, good point. It's easy to turn it into an us vs them issue, but it doesn't have to be that way. Remember that I am sometimes trying to get a reaction to see what other people think. I don't believe email will be completely replaced, especially for one-on-one communications.

We are a brazilian blog about guerrilla marketing, and we frequently talk about RSS cases. We have signed to your feed in other to receive more stories from you guys which we believe are very good.

As avid information consumers we prefer 1000 times to read through our list of favorite blogs with our feed agreggator rather than reading emails.

One single point our friendly CEO from the email company didn?t mention is the amount of software targeted exactly to block those "unsolicited emails". RSS is a permission based channel. We get more trust signing up the RSS feed than giving out our email address.

And actually we signed up to several promotional feeds as well, which we read more often than the email ones. Are we a niche? yes. Here in Brazil the little orange button is still forgotten at the end of the blog. However, that doesn?t mean his vision of RSS is right.

We have encouraged our blog readers to read our RSS feeds as well and in 3 weeks 70% percent of the access to blog items were all through the RSS messages. We then asked then what they liked best in their agreggators the most common answer was "we dont need to wait for the blog?s template to load up, just the item."

Bambuzada Team: Thanks for the case study on yourself. Your information is heartening. That's exactly the kind of response we all want via RSS.

PS. If you can, make sure your RSS buttons are always at the top of your website/ weblog. It's something I'm in the process of doing for all of my sites.