The power of RSS for content syndication is without a doubt unprecedented, especially when considered from the viewpoint of "online conversations".

I'm not talking about "manual dialog facilitation" this time, but rather about what goes on in the background after our RSS publishing (syndication) system is already in place.

One of my favorite examples of this is Robin Good's blog announcement (with an audio interview) of "Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS".

The announcement was published on 2004-12-22.

By 2004-12-26 (as Google tells me), the story was "automatically picked up" via RSS by app. 23 other web sites, such as http://technology.updates.com/search.aspx?vert=15&kw=hrastnik and http://www.cadwebsitedesign.com/news/Dec04/TheRSSInsiderVieweBookReadyForRelease.html.

That's 23 references to Robin's article on other web media (generating new traffic to Robin's site, as well as additional brand recognition and credibility), 23 inbound links, being picked up by Google and other search engines to increase Robin's search engine rankings, and 23 opportunities for the conversation to spread further and for the process to continue.

The cool thing (yeah, even after researching RSS for so long I still think this is cool:) is that once the RSS publishing (syndication) system is in place, most of this happens almost automatically.

Now, to further prove the point, head on to Google and search for "hrastnik RSS" (without the "). Almost all of the first 100 results are announcements of the release of my RSS e-book (this time, most aren't from Robin's post above).

The important point here is that these have been generated ("automatically" and with people actually writing about it) from about 27 "original" blog posts (on different blogs), but then "carried" throughout the internet with the power of RSS content syndication.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm still a huge e-mail marketing fan (hey, the thing still sells), but I actually don't know of any e-mail marketing campaigns that generated such huge buzz in a matter of some short weeks. The cool thing (here's that word again) is that for RSS publishers this is nothing special, but just one of the benefits RSS provides.

I'm looking to further research this, especially in regards to blogsites. I'm currently looking for a really elegant way of setting up a blogsite for free, to give everyone out there a shot at it.