Marc Ohmann’s Blog

What is your formula for attracting the attention of your audience online? What if you target audience was technology professionals in the Internet space who tend to be male and under 40? Would you create hype by attempting to purchase Superbowl commercials for $2.5M a piece and having them rejected for their content. When your cleaned up version is finally accepted your unedited versions are spreading like wildfire across the Internet. $2.5M spent to run one ad results in countless commercial views online and brand impressions for years to come.

Yesterday I was in a meeting with a partner from a mid-sized insurance firm here locally.  We were discussing all the exciting aspects of Internet marketing, social media and most importantly public relations online.  Jeff Rabkin from Wowza was in the meeting also and was discussing his recent experiences with Mattress Giant.

For anyone who doesn't want to read the article.  The gist is that a Google search for Mattress Giant displays a negative review from epinions.com as the second organic result.

In our meeting the insurance company partner was amazed that negative results could show up and that Mattress Giant was trying to improve their image online. 

Since I will never have time to read all of Lee's 256 Must Read Blogs (which leaves me with 330 in my reader), I figured to put all this knowledge to best use all the sites should go into a custom search engine.

Creating the CSE would have only involved a quick Perl script on the OPML file but thanks to Feedburner, it's not that easy.  So anyhow incase anyone wants it, here is the file listing every site included .

Here is the link to the actual search engine page or you can make use of a search box like the one below.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. And basically it allows readers to subscribe to information they are interested in receiving. Although RSS has been around since mid 1999, it has only recently gained popularity as a mainstream business tool.

Here we will run through some of the reasons you should consider implementing RSS on your site to help your business.