In the recent Shop.org report - "State of Retailing Online" - 55% of online retailers want to focus more on widgets.

Here at nooked HQ we are seeing more and more retailers using widgets to engage with consumers - ranging from desktop widgets, facebook applications, twitter feeds and web widgets. Real validation of FeedCommerce.

More details from report

The study also found 53 percent of retailers surveyed allocated their marketing budgets toward customer acquisition and 21 percent of their marketing budget toward customer retention.

Other findings include:
* 35 percent of retailers will continue to market through search engines.
* 90 percent will use pay-for-performance search placement and 79 percent said they will make this a priority this year.
* 85 percent said they have used some shipping with conditions promotion in the past and 35 percent said they will focus on more of these promotions this year.
* 65 percent said they will increase focus on social networking advertisements
* 55 percent said they will focus on Web widgets.

I was honoured to pick up a Net Visionary Award from the board of the Irish Internet Association last night in Dublin – at a plush black-tie dinner. The award is recognition to the nooked team – keep up the great work – and to the wider web2ireland community. Thanks to Fergal and the IIA team for a great night.

Yes, we are alive and well – apologies for lack of blogging – I promise to write more…. and more. We’re about to release some new products into the wild, but firstly I want to give a backdrop to what we’re up to.

Back in 2004 when the web was full of RSS virgins – over pints of Guinness in Sligo we threw around scenarios on what RSS would be used for. Distributing press releases, subscribing to blogs, tracking product announcements, etc were all scribbled down on the back of the beer mats. Three years later RSS is everywhere – publishers are using RSS to distribute media, marketers are using RSS to push out press releases and product offers, start pages are the new web2.0 rage – and rss is the “plumbing” of the whole web2.0 movement.

Back in nooked labs we were having loads of fun educating, evangelizing and promoting RSS as a great marketing tool. We were not alone. Loads of marketers answered the “call to action”. With our feedwizard product, we were able to see first hand what people were doing around RSS marketing. But a lot of folks just don’t get the religion. RSS is still too geeky for some – we need better ways for the consumer to get information.

One interesting project one of our developers, Padraig, did last year to address the “geekiness” issue [obviously using his 20% time] is almost ready to come out of the lab. Padraig “created” feeds from his favourite online retailers – and we built up a nice collection of feeds. As Dave Winer has said “Feeds containing commercial information people want, are wired”. He added in other clever additions to tweak the output options – some personalized filters [Thanks Toni for the tip] and a little widget [dogfooding widget marketing].

The online shoppers in nooked labs love our service – the bigger credit card bills is proof of that love. This project – nicknamed “feedshop” – for really simple shopping – has came in handy when we talk to online retailers – it certainly helps at demo time. The analogy we use for retailers is “feedcommerce = an e-commerce system driven by RSS”.

Fred Wilson – the renowned VC blogger – also thinks feedcommerce is big biz. feedcommerce is the next generation e-commerce system and RSS is the currency! feedcommerce presents opportunities for a lot of folks. For consumers it means subscribing to personalized RSS feeds of products that are of interest to them and which they may purchase from time to time. For online retailers, it means providing their users with the means to create these personalized product and service feeds. It also means utilizing all the Web platforms that are available to reach consumers – such as blogs, social networks, start pages, Google, and so on.

Stay tuned as nooked introduces “feedshop” into the world – we may come up with a different name – but now back to work for a bit as we build the first feedcommerce platform in the world.

Just to let everyone know nooked has not been acquired.

Stay tuned for some exciting (and accurate) news from nooked over the next few weeks.

Tags: nooked, feedburner

Happy New Year to all readers.

We’ve all set out our resolutions for 2006

RSS has gained a lot of momentum in 2005, and 2006 looks like it will be a really exciting year for all of us.

Wishing you and your families a joyous holiday season.

Picture taken near the famous Glencar Waterfall made famous by WB Yeats poem “The stolen child�

nooked allocates its Christmas card budget to the local chapter of St.Vincent De Paul

Best Regards

Fergus and nooked team

I’ve been to 2 events over the past few weeks – both were very different.

1st up was the Online Information event in London – attendees were from major industries, with some very large scale publishers on show.

The 2 panels I participated on were most interesting – “Content syndication – supply and demand” and “Monitoring and mining the blogosphere”

The Content Syndication – supply and demand panel was made up of Peter Scott, RSS Compendium, Philippe Borremans, IBM and I.We did our best to demonstrate great examples of content syndication, and where RSS is used today. I’ve had email dialogue with Peter and Philippe previously, and it was a pleasure to meet in person.

The “Monitoring and mining the blogosphere” panel was made up David Tebbutt (Journalist supremo), Bradley Horowitz (Yahoo), Loic Le Meur (SixApart), Salim Ismail (PubSub) and I.

David was a graceful moderator, and we had a great dialogue with the audience – questions ranges from “flickr model”, “content use/re-use”, dark web, structured blogging, Nokia blogging strategy, 90million + blogs, RSS readers (and the problems with them), Attention, etc – it was great.

Thanks to Adriana for organizing a great track on WIKIS, BLOGS AND RSS, and to Lorna for the logistics.

Back to base for a few days, and then I was off to LesBlogs. This event has been made famous for other reasons – it was great event with a great mix of countries and knowledge. ( I also got to meet at least 5 other Irish bloggers – which was cool). I also managed to make the tail end of a dinner, where I had the pleasure of meeting and drinking with 642.entry”>MaryAm (the other half of Scobleizer) , Tebbo and Dennis

I was on the RSS panel, with Scott Rafer, Wireless Inc, Dana VanDen Heuvel, Pheedo, Steve Olechowski, COO & Co-Founder,FeedBurner, and Greg Reinacker, NewsGator Technologies.

Elizabeth did a great job keeping the questions coming from the audience. Conversation ranged from RSS monetization, Consumer use of RSS, RSS Reading (again), RSS Metrics, RSS tracking (copyright), Content use/re-use, structured blogging, etc. Marc made sure we were on our toes.

Thanks to Loic, Elizabeth and Guillaume and team for the excellent organization.

No more events for 2005 – Unfortunatly I won’t make Syndicate – i’m off on a short family vacation with family before the Xmas panic sets in

Tags: lesblogs, online information, dotben,pheedo, feedburner, allrss, loiclemeur, newsgator, yahoo, pubsub, scott rafer, nooked, rss

A PR executive, Trevor Jonas, at Bite PR, posts a great piece on why all PR people should be using RSS to keep on top of information.

See this quote….

“Instead, I simply subscribe to an RSS feed once, and then every time new content is published, it automatically appears in my RSS reader. This way, I’m able to pull all the content (and only the content) I care about into a single view on my web browser.

As someone in PR, this is an absolutely invaluable tool. It not only saves tons of time, but I often find myself being one of the first to spot a breaking story about a client or a competitor. Granted, it’s a major behavioral change so it won’t happen easily, but I think every single one of us should be using an RSS reader—especially those that have the daily duty of monitoring what’s being written about clients and competitors. “