The RSS Industry Night Roundtable yesterday was an amazing event. Quite difficult to explain in words, but it really was the first event where about 95% of the RSS industry sat down together, had dinner and openly started discussing RSS issues.

We never got through all of the issues we planned to tackle, but we did cover the one that might be the most important one for RSS industry growth in marketing circles, especially customer relationship marketing and direct marketing.

IRSS - Individualized RSS - which allows marketers to track, customize and personalize RSS feeds, was never a problem in terms of feed creation, but is a problem for RSS aggregators due to bandwidth and othe issues. The other big issue is indexing individualized feeds, which is happening right now. Google for example will index an individual feed and make it accessible through their search engine, even though the feed is actually personalized for just one content consumer.

At the roundtable, we worked together to identify three distinct levels of individualized RSS:

Level #1: Metrics Enabled
Metrics Enabled RSS feeds are using unique URLs to identify unique users, but their content and structure are always the same. The solution to this problem is adding some additional meta data to the RSS specification, which would allow the aggregators to cache the feed, but still enable the metrics.

Level #2: Customized Feeds
Customized feeds carry different content items for different users. The content items themselves are the same, but different users will get different items. The solution to this problem is adding additional meta data to the content item itself, to let the aggregators identify individual content items, regardless of what feed from a certain publisher they appear in.

Level #3: Personalized feeds
In personalized feeds the actual content items may differ, for example by including the name of the recipient and data unique to that recipient. This can again be solved by meta data, which would tell the aggregators that this content item in fact is unique.

And finally, we discussed an additional NO INDEX meta element, which would tell the aggregators not to index a specific feed.

The great part about the event was that we actually had real communication between marketers, RSS publishing vendors and RSS aggregators, discussing various needs and possible solutions.

Now I'm only hoping that we'll be able to really follow-up and start implementing all of the solutions we discussed at the event. Considering the crowd that was present, we really might be looking at an industry wide solutions.

Thanks to Pheedo for unofficially hosting the event. I really enjoyed moderating it.