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132 Part 1 Introduction

3 External business e-mail.
4 Personal e-mail (friends and family).
At the same time the policy will seek to improve productivity and the quality of response to
customers and partners. The controls that can be introduced in each area are described in
Chapter 11.
Outbound e-mail Outbound e-mail marketing is an important tool for communicating with customers as
E-mail sent from the explained in Chapter 9.
company to other
organizations.
Feeds

Feed Feeds are an important method of exchanging different types of information using standard
Information is regularly formats typically based on XML. One example of use of feeds to exchange information between
exchanged between a
server and another server databases on two servers is uploading product details and prices to a price comparison site such
or a client using a as Google product search which is facilitated through Google Base (http://base.google.com).
standardized XML format The best-known type of feed is Really Simple Syndication (RSS), also sometimes known
enabling the latest
version of the information as ‘Rich Site Summary’, which is an Internet standard for publishing and exchanging content
to be exchanged. using XML. From a practical viewpoint it enables two things. First, content can be syndi-
cated or published on one site that originates on another site. Second, and of much greater
Really Simple
Syndication (RSS) interest to promoting a web site, it is a relatively new method of distributing alerts to cus-
feeds tomers. Initially, the RSS messages were received by specialist software which could be
Blog, news or other downloaded for free such as RSS Reader (www.rssreader.com) or sites which receive feeds
content is published by
an XML standard and such as Netvibes (www.netvibes.com), iGoogle (www.google.com/ig) and Bloglines
syndicated for other sites (www.bloglines.com). These RSS readers, or aggegators, poll for RSS at a defined interval,
or read by users in RSS often once an hour. Figure 3.11 shows an example of a technology trial to deliver different
reader software services.
Now typically shortened personalized content into a personalized home page.
to ‘feed’, e.g. news feed
or sports feed.

Figure 3.11 Personalized feed home page from iGoogle (www.igoogle.com)