Recently it seems that you can’t pick up a magazine, watch a news show or browse a website without seeing reference to a blog or its accompanying technology - RSS.
Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster crowned "blog" the No. 1 word of the year in 2004. Especially in the media world, this new form has definitely made its presence felt. A study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project confirmed that by November 2004, 32.4 million adult American Internet users had visited a blog.
While still in the process of becoming part of the mainstream, RSS is already a global phenomenon with early adopters utilizing RSS to attract readers to their websites and syndicate content. The same Pew study reports that 5% (6 million) of Americans now consume news and information through RSS.
The first indicators of the application of this technology in travel, specifically in electronic distribution, is evidenced by the agenda of the upcoming TravelCom Expo: The Three Letters That Are About to Rock Travel Distribution: RSS – I am sure this will not be the last conference track dedicated to the topic.
Some definitions: A blog, short for web log, is a medium in which an author (or blogger) writes a journal-style website with provisions for readers to respond.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is a defacto standard that emerged from the need to “push” summary headlines about new content on websites out via special readers. Bloggers utilize this channel to notify their audience that they have posted a new entry on their blog.
Users can subscribe to the RSS feed and in this way are notified every time content is updated on a website. The characteristic icon 
lets you know the webpage has been optimized for syndication and can be subscribed to via a reader. There are now many readers, including My MSN, My Yahoo, You Subscribe and NewsGator, to name a few. RSS reader functionality is being added to most common email tools. Web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox already have the functionality built in. Internet Explorer will soon have the functionality as well.
The obvious application of RSS technology in travel is to allow website visitors to subscribe to the special offers and events pages to be notified whenever something new is added. From the supplier perspective this is great push marketing to get your targeted promotion to a very qualified customer (one who has opted-in by subscribing) as well as encourage an ongoing dialog – fundamentals of effective one-to-one marketing.
An additional benefit to incorporating this technology on a travel website is that RSS can greatly improve website rankings due to the fact that new content delivery is the main objective of the technology and a major influencer in the search engine ranking process. At the same time RSS specific search engines and directories are beginning to emerge, which will result in new traffic to the supplier website. A recent example of the results that can be achieved:
Blogs can be leveraged in many ways to promote a travel supplier website. The first would be to add a blog to the website itself. For example various subject matter experts from a resort hotel property such as the executive chef, spa director or the golf pro could regularly blog about their area of expertise, events and happenings etc. to encourage an ongoing dialog with prospective or past guests.
Another way the network of blogs that is being established (sometimes referred to as the blogosphere) can be leveraged to get the word out about a specific event or promotion is to have a well established blogger in that space blog about the event. In this way you reach a new targeted audience and leverage the syndication element of the blogs themselves to spread the word – they are all connected via RSS technology.
The Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in
The technology, though new and seemingly complex, has at its core some very simple concepts: ongoing communication with the customer, extending your brand, and ultimately promoting your offering.
