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RSS Plus One?

How do you get updates from your favourite websites? Ian Delaney reports on a possible solution to a thorny problem.

How do you get updates from your favourite websites? Ian Delaney reports on a possible solution to a thorny problem.

The answer is probably via email or RSS (real simple syndication). Of course, though, neither of them work quite the way you'd want them to. Email is broken for all kinds of reasons. The main one is spam. According to Postini, almost 93 per cent of emails are spam messages, a rise of 147 per cent in the last 12 months. Because of that, you have probably got a spam filter. But as spammers get cleverer, the number of legitimate commercial emails that you've actually signed-up for that gets classified as spam increases continually.

Five per cent of emails are categorised as 'phishing' emails - those emails posing as an authority such as a bank that attempt to get you to part with your credit card details and other information. The latter have increased by 55 per cent in the last six months alone. The banks say they think that their consequent inability to talk to customers (who think their legitimate emails are phishing attempts) is costing them £2.7bn a year.

So perhaps you've shifted away from email newsletters for updates, and onto RSS?

It works very well for eliminating spam or phishing messages, and it can real speed-up the daily intake of information from dozens of different sites. The trouble comes, of course, when you're away for a day or two and come back to 3000 unread postings from your favourite blogs and websites.

RSS is also arguably a bit scattergun. Suppose you're looking for a certain piece of information - when Dr. Who is on television, for example, or when a stock goes over 62p per share - it's actually very hard to winnow out that information. The nearest you're likely to get is a feed of unfiltered information - everything that's on television or every stock movement.

So I was interested to hear about elertz from its founder, Steve Morris, and its sales director, Steve Saunders. Basically, it's an Internet Explorer toolbar that flashes a red button whenever the information you've signed up for is updated. Their own example was 'when are the Red Hot Chilli Peppers next playing near me?' You can sign up for concert email lists from all sorts of places, but very few of them are intelligent enough to provide the custom information that you're looking for. Their second example was stock market prices. You don't want every update, just certain conditions to be met.

Another advantage is timeliness: the elertz server polls the information sources you've signed up for every 30 seconds. The difference between that and the several hours it can take to receive email alerts can be pretty vital when it comes to getting a good price for those shares or Glastonbury tickets, for example. The updates can optionally be re-routed as SMS messages to a mobile phone when you're away from your computer.

The elertz toolbar is free for both users and publishers. The company makes its money from contextual ads in the right-hand portion of its toolbar. These can pick up on what you're searching for to display appropriate material. The company has just signed up with Miva for its inventory. They share the revenue from these advertisements with the publishers who adopt the elertz toolbar in a 50-50 split. The server software - which I didn't see - is apparently easy to install and is compatible with a wide range of popular web platforms.

The company has recently signed up astrologer Russell Grant as a client. He normally sends out half-a-million horoscope emails a day, and clearly a move to elertz could provide a cost saving on sending these emails plus extra revenue from the ads in the toolbar. They've also come to an agreement with Simon Fuller's 19 management company - one of the makers of T4's Popworld - to use the toolbar for sending updates to music fans. For any website owner, the share from the contextual ads on the toolbar could be an important extra revenue stream.

Morris and Saunders admit that it's early days, and are actively seeking more content partners. However, they're convinced that it's only a matter of time before they reach, (their words) "critical mass".