It's time for the RSS Workshop session, with Jeremy Phillips, COO of Market Clusters. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a great way to stay in touch with all your favourite websites' latest content - subscribe to RSS feeds published by an increasing number of websites, and their new content, maybe even results for search terms you have predefined, comes to you automatically.

Reading content via RSS is actually pretty easy; you just install a news reader application, plug in the feed (that's the orange icon in most cases) and watch as a sea of information floods in. How to filter the sound from the noise? Market Clusters claims to offer "offer a revolutionary way to track and manage, in real-time, the explosion of news and dealflow across digital media sectors". That means advanced news and opinion tracking to the level of granularity where a start exec can track "podcasting deals that have happened in the last six months involving Yahoo! or AOL", says Jeremy. "RSS is another way of delivering your stream of consciousness to the market," he said.

"Press releases are perfect for RSS", Jeremy added. True. Not enough companies publish their press releases by RSS. Think about it. As a press officer, you're publishing your press release to your website. As a journalist, I'm not routinely interested in your website, not visiting it. You need to tell me when to go check out your press releases; make it easy for me. Case in point: DMGT, Pearson and NewsCorp publish their press releases to a static page; when that page changes, I don't know. So, using a bit of technical know-how, I managed to scrape those pages to create RSS feeds for each. Hurrah, the skies are blue again and I've saved myself two minutes a day having to visit those sites. Which adds up to about 13 hours in a year. Jeremy's right

-- Rob