Bill Kearney

Personal RSS and advertising?

Hmmm, Kottke got me thinking. There are several RSS feeds already available that focus on informing you of promotions, deals or other bargains from various retailers. I happened to use one of them to save me a bunch of money on some laptop RAM. This makes me wonder how to use this for other situations.

Firstly, I'm steadfastly opposed to retailers and advertisers forcing crap on me. It's MY time and I'm not going to put up with it being wasted by marketing nitwits. I want what I want, not what some demographer has bullshitted the vendor into thinking I want. Yeah, you could say I've got a strong opinion here. That said, I'm not opposed to the vendors being able to make a buck. I'm just sick of the crappy ways they do it now.

So here's what I'm thinking, how about combining RSS with things like personal wish lists? (Kevin Burton has indicated a similar interest) The extremely tricky problem here is how to share what you want without having the marketing drones assault you because of it. This is certainly a rocky coastline beneath great cliffs. There are bodies of dead efforts littering it's shores. Intelligent agents rotting as far as the eye can see.

Hmmm, how to tackle this? Perhaps with UPC codes? What if your wish list contained UPC codes for the items that interest you? This way something that understood the codes could then traverse to offerings from other vendors. This would, of course, put the burden on you to dig up the codes. I've got a cuecat lurking around here somewhere and it might be one way to gather them. I'd have to imagine some of the online catalog companies have this information available in one form or another.

Wake up merchants, don't think we're going to buy soley from you. Don't try holding us hostage with your private SKU numbers. There's a standard out there for this stuff, start using it and don't try hiding it from us. We're the one with the money to spend and we're not going to continue to put up with your shenanigans. We'll buy from people that offer good deals, suit our agendas and don't behave like mindless idiots. This does, of course, narrow the field by a dramatic percentage...

So start with UPC codes for stuff you want. You tell your aggregator about this list. You also tell it about RSS feeds of sources and bargains. It cross references what you're after, what's like it from other vendors and it aggregates the results. It might even be worth considering the use of a 'search broker' to do this for you. You share you list with it and it does the dirty work of finding the stuff for you. The trick is that broker would have to be something you REALLY trusted. The first sign of it taking your data and pimping you off to the direct marketers would be it's death knell. Trouble is it seems many efforts absolutely depend on selling your soul this way. This has made the users tremendously skeptical, and rightly so.

Anyway, I'm starting a list of RSS feeds related to finding deals. Take a look at it. Right now there doesn't seem to be much in the way of decent metadata in these feeds. Perhaps we can work to change this...