A Q Channel is your electronic courier and delivery truck!

You may be asking yourself, "I already have a website, why do I need an RSS feed?"   Think of it this way, your website is your storefront, your RSS feed, or Q Channel is your personal courier and delivery truck.

Your merchandise, be it information, goods or services, are just sitting idly on the electronic "shelves" of your webpages. But they are not going to move until people become aware of what you have to offer. And, if you add new items to inventory, how will anyone know, unless they visit your site? But as the number of pages on the web grows, (it is well over a billion as of this writing), even if they have been to your site once, will they come back? What if they forgot to bookmark your site? How will they find you again in all that clutter?

But, what if you had your own electronic courier and delivery truck which could constantly shuttle around the web, letting those who are interested in your products know that you have added new items? For those who publish online, Q Channels deliver your product directly to your subscribers, with no delay or interference. For those of you with goods and services to sell, a Q Channel is your personal courier or town crier, alerting those who have subscribed that you have new inventory or you are running a sale. You might even want to run special sales, just for your subscribers, as an incentive for them to watch your Q Channel closely.

Q Channels provide you a direct, regular connection to your customers, with numerous options for two-way communication, to allow you to develop and strengthen those important relationships. We all know that it is much less expensive and a lot easier to keep good customers than to try to find new ones. With Q Channels you can forge strong bonds with your customers, and build your business on a solid foundation.

The ability of Q Channels to ping Weblogs.com is also a valuable benefit of the Quikonnex service. It is a powerful marketing tool which will increase your visibility on the Internet. For more information, please click on over to Why Ping Weblogs.com?

If you would like more information on the features and benefits of having an RSS feed, we recommend that you review RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters, by Mark Nottingham. It is pretty technical, though parts of it are in actual English. If you do find it a little confusing, don't worry, the Qs understand it and have made sure that Q Channels provide you will all of these features, benefits and advantages.

A Brief Summary of RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or Really Stops Spam, depending on who you ask. Essentially, it is a protocol, an application of XML, which makes it possible to syndicate and aggregate online content. RSS files are used to create a data feed which will deliver headlines, links or, in fact, just about anything, to a channel viewer application, like QuikView or DeskView. These applications are sometimes also called news readers or aggregators. These programs will constantly monitor the RSS feeds to which they are subscribed, and alert the user when new information has been added to a feed, what we call channels.

There are multiple versions of RSS currently in use, with different numbered versions. The higher number does NOT indicate a more advanced or powerful version of the protocol, as the development of RSS forked some years ago, and there are now two distinct and separate formats. But don't worry, Q Channels are able to handle both formats with ease!

If you would like more detailed information on the history and development of RSS, we recommend that you check out What is RSS? by Mark Pilgrim. It is pretty technical, but it is the best introductory information on the subject we have seen available on the web. And remember, you don't have to learn RSS to use it, all you need is a Publishing membership in Quikonnex to have all of that techie stuff taken care of for you. Then you can concentrate on your business and leave the technology to the Qs!

Believe it or not, these are all names of applications called variously channel viewers, news aggregators or feed readers. There are dozens of them available on the net, with more popping up every day. If you would like to peruse one of the more comprehensive lists of these applications, you can visit the DMOZ RSS Readers List.

Or, you can take a look at the list of applications compiled and reviewed by About.com guide Heinz Tschabitscher, at RSS Feed Readers / News Aggregators.

Each of these applications handles RSS feeds in a slightly different way. After extensive research, the Qheads chose Awasu from this group for use with Q Channels because it was very user-friendly, full-featured and did not strip tags, allowing subscribers to see everything their publishers have to offer. However, it is currently Windows-only and it does require a small download, which are impediments to some of our Q Channel subscribers.

This morass of viewers and the needs of our subscribers is also the reason that the Qheads decided to develop their own in-browser channel viewer sidebar, which they called QuikView. It is easy to get and use and not only is it a channel viewer, it is also a personal bookmark server, which both our publishers and their subscribers are finding very handy.

If you would like more information about our channel viewer of choice, please click on over to QuikView - Our Channel Viewer for more details, and to get your own free channel viewer and personal bookmark server.

Really Simple Syndication for Beginners -- RSS 101

If you wish to learn more about the nuts and bolts of RSS, there are a couple of good sites we can recommend for your edification. They are fairly technical, but they have useful and comprehensive information about the inner workings of RSS feeds, for those who want to peek under the hood.

One of the most encyclopedic sites on all aspects of RSS is the State of Utah's RSS Workshop. It may be more than you want to know, but it is a good place to learn about the full scope of RSS publishing. You will find out about all those little orange XML boxes you see on many websites. And quite a lot of it is written in normal English, so you can glean valuable information about how this technology works.

A less detailed, but reasonably brief interpretation can be found at DotNetJunkies. The article, by Jeff Julian is called Got RSS?

For the code warriors among you, we recommend a two-part of series published at WebReference.com. This series was intended for webmasters, so it is very code-heavy, but it does contain a very thorough explanation of the entire RSS publishing process:

  Part 1 -- Creating RSS files for your Web site

  Part 2 -- Registering and publishing with RSS

Don't worry if you find all of the information provided at these site a little overwhelming, the Qs have got it covered! If you would rather spend your time disseminating information, rather than writing code, all you have to do is join Quikonnex as a Publishing Member. You will then have your own RSS feeds, which we call Q Channels. Unlike many RSS feeds, they are media-rich, so you can put anything in your channel, HTML, or audio and video, there are no restrictions.

Plus, Q Channels come with multiple options for two-way communications, so you can easily stay connected, without dependence on email. If you have been thinking of going with RSS, but found it too complicated or one-sided, Quikonnex is the solution. You get all of the benefits of RSS and more, with no programming required!

Why Awasu is our favorite desktop channel viewer

Awasu is a Japanese word which means to join together, to unite, to combine, to connect, and that is exactly what it does. The philosophy of the creators of Awasu is to make channel viewing easy for everyone, and they have succeeded admirably.

Awasu is the most user-friendly and elegant of all the desktop channel viewers we have reviewed. You will see and hear us refer to it as QuikAwasu because we like it so much that we had it customized for our subscriber's use. It is a snap to download and install, comes pre-loaded with our Qsupport and QuikAssist channels, as well as Qsearch. The channel wizard makes subscribing to new channels easy and fool-proof. You can customize each channel to notify you when the publisher has added new items either by sight, by sound, or both.

Awasu is browser-based, which means it can deliver media-rich channels with no loss of clarity in either picture or sound. You will see everything your publisher has to offer, as s/he intended you to see and hear it. No longer will your ISP strip those graphics and sound files out of your ezine or newsletter. Click the link below to get your own copy and start channeling! Download QuikAwasu Now!

Channel Viewers and News Readers

Channel viewers, news readers and aggregators are alternate terms for the same type of application. They have been used for sometime by webloggers and tech-savvy journalists, among others, who want to monitor information posted on various web sites around the globe.

By using these viewers, they bring a world of information to their desktop and save themselves hours of time surfing the net, trying to find the data they want. These viewers are typically made available for free, via the Internet. Most of them allow customization of channel settings to notify their users when any new information is posted in any channel to which they have subscribed. The viewers do all the work of gathering data, and present it as soon as it is available.

In recent months, channel viewers have matured, and are breaking out of the geek world in which they were originally conceived. This technology is now ready for prime time, and is easy to use by regular folks, no propellers required.