Here's a vision for how RSS will be used in online learning:

Imagine a universal portal (public or internal for corporate use) that
does nothing more than help people to collect feeds that will help them
learn about subjects they care about. The portal packages their
learning interests into RSS collections that can be subscribed to with
a single click. Taken a step further, imagine the RSS reader for the
learning process is Macromedia Flash™ and it delivers a rich environment that
carries brands about the technologies you are studying as well as audio
and video resources relevant to the learning feeds selected.

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Yesterday I was given a tutorial in blogs and search by Amanda Watlington, who has a very good blog on this subject called Blogs and Feeds. Amanda is also the co-author (with Bill Ives) of the newly published Business Blogs: A Practical Guide.
which features some of the work we have done here at the Otter Group on
blogging for business. We will soon have link from our site for those
of you who would like to purchase the book through The Otter Group.

Amanda is the best person I have met on the subject of blogs and
search–one of the most valuable by-products of creating a blog for your
business. In an article she published in e-marketing, here's how she explains why blogs and search go hand-in-hand:

The reason is simple: the technology underlying blogs and blogging is
search friendly, and blog content is both fresh and rich in topical
relevance. Aren't these attributes just what search engines have told
search marketers they want - fresh, relevant content? Blogs are like
candy to spiders - not necessarily good for them but snatched up as
eagerly as Halloween trick-or-treats by kids.

The search spider's behavior should encourage bloggers to enhance
their blog's search visibility by creating keyword-rich content….What
I advocate is purposefully creating blog content that a search engine
can readily index and display on keywords of your selection. Bloggers
can power up their blogs by doing keyword research before they develop
their blog and then using the research results during content creation.

Effective keyword research for blogs requires clearly defining the
blog's audience in advance of content creation. Before starting to
develop the blog, you should have done some thinking about the
audience: Who do you expect to read your blog? What do you expect them
to get from it? What are your audience's “hot-button” keywords? Since
most blogs are highly topical, they intrinsically have tightly
controlled vocabularies.

As you decide on your audience, you are by default doing your
preliminary keyword research. The keyword list developed during the
audience-definition phase can become a working guide for content
development. Then the keywords, since they reflect the topic and
audience interests, do not have to be forced or stuffed into the
content. Effective blog writing is in essence the development of
timely, topical content guided by a pre-selected, controlled
vocabulary.

The ability to create categories and, wonder-of-wonders,
subcategories opens a world of possibilities for improving both the
search engine sensitivity and the usability of the blog content. You
can use the categories and subcategories to reflect key audience
interests and of course the content itself. The categories are text
links, from my keyword-centric point of view, “keyword opportunity
zones.”

I recommend reading all this article as it is extremely informative about this topic and very well written.

Now that I have met Amanda and been tutored by her in
keyword-rich content and categories, I am going to re-structure all of
our blogs so that they follow her advice. When I talk about blogs in my
public speaking, people are often skeptical of a blog's utility. The
“aha” moment usually comes when I demonstrate how my own blog comes up
number 1(out of 10.5 million responses) in a google search for the
keywords “weblogs AND email”:

Getting better search results through your blog seems to be one
of the most valuable things you can do with it. So with that in mind,
here are Amanda's recommendations about how to improve your search
results with your blog:

• Build a keyword list that will attract the right readership.
• Align your categories with your keywords.
• Include your kewords in the headlines for your posts.
• When you create links, make sure the anchor text includes your key words.
• Make sure you are generating fresh content with your post.

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Dr. Weiss continues to discuss key skills you need for successful negotiations, this week it's Skill #4: Being Assertive.

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