I recieved an e-mail from Reuters a few weeks ago about a media industry event. I was certainly flattered by the obvious form e-mail addressing me “As a leading Blog within the Media space.”

Unfortunately when I subscribed to the RSS feed and went to the very bottom of my Bloglines list and I completely missed it until today. Funny thing.. today this special RSS is filled with stories on missle defense for private planes and the US Air Force’s weapons budget!

It turns out this is some generic list for all “Reuters Summit” events (I don’t know if that is technically the correct term.) I think this highlights a need for dynamic RSS feed management, much in a way some e-mail lists are managed today.

I can’t think of a better way of getting someone to subscribe to your RSS feed than complementing them on their authoritativeness and then including a link to a highly relevent feed.

Why shouldn’t your RSS feed have options? Perhaps you are an affiliate marketer promoting Azoogle offers only through Google Adwords. Instead of recieving my posts on domain names and long rants about wealth building you only recieve posts about affiliate marketing, Azoogle, and Adwords. This is just what Google does with Google News Alerts. Perhaps this would make a good Wordpress plug-in… if it doesn’t already exist.

This concept could be developed in a more advanced way. Integrated with a customer management platform you could broadcast relevent news via RSS based on the user’s demographics and past purchasing history. (may be I could suggest this for my friend Brendon to use on his Australian Ugg Boots e-commerce site!)

Reuters could have automatically rolled that feed in to a keyword-targetted feed about online media rather than taking the topic horizontal (i.e., another Reuters Summit.) This little “mistake” from Reuters illustrates a larger point: give visitors what they came for. Its a simple concept, but in my experience its the simple, common sense, stuff which matters most.