I’m listening to the Individualized-RSS podcast over at Marketing Edge podcast. The conversation is an attempt to bring the weakness of email into the strength of RSS (or verse-vica as the case maybe) – unique reader identification.

This is what I alluded to in this post from a couple months ago. There’s nothing in the technology of RSS that prevents people from identifying themselves – just by adding some identifier (another url for example) to the end of the URL string.

Any more registration isn’t necessary or even good (yes, this is a hack.)

Plus, it’s a much friendlier way to build a relationship with people. Registration (of any sort) requires people to make a commitment before they know the relationship will be useful and valuable. Not cool.

On the other hand, there are some specific situations where a locked down, personally-identifiable RSS feed actually adds value to the customer. I’m thinking of communications that needs audit-ability, a high-level of filtering, and guaranteed delivery. We’re not talking marketing communications here – we’re talking Very Serious Business and in that case, I recommend talking to Kris at Pale Groove about CastLock.