Many sites these days are offering an RSS feed of sorts, completely un-blog-related: airline deals, etc. Craigslist allows any search results to be subscribed to as RSS. The Walker calendar just finished an (unlaunched) RSS feed of custom searches - want to know when we're showing your favorite Matthew Barney film? Subscribe.
These non-blog RSS feeds are a very useful tool to drive traffic and increase attention and/or sales. As with everything we're talking about, the real trick is figuring out what makes sense to use them for.
Examples:
- http://mnartists.org/
- Not technically a blog - we have feeds for almost every updated part of the site: events, news, artist uploads, category uploads, etc.
- http://press.walkerart.org/
- should be a *cast - enclose the PDF
- http://channel.walkerart.org/
- should be a vodcast - enclose the movie or audio
Great tool: The Walker integrates RSS into the source XML because that's how our system works - what if yours is a legacy system in the middle of an upgrade or you just don't have time to mess with pulling the feed, parsing, styling, etc?
Well, check it out:
These guys have written a really cool php / javascript page and setup utility that generates a javascript code snippet that will automatically embed a feed in your page. It's better seen than talked about, I'll demo it if time allows.
They offer a free hosted version of the script, which makes setup take about 1 minute. Or you can download the PHP scripts and run it yourself in about 5 minutes - and then you have full control of the look and feel.
This is just one example, but I think it's clear how powerful, dynamic, and easy it can be to include feeds in other pages of your website.