Dan points out a PR firm using RSS, great idea… anything to keep PR people from calling me on my cellphone to ask me "Oh, how are you doing? I just wanted to call to say hi and see if you got the press release I emailed you." My response "I'm not sure I  know you, and I get 100+ PR a day… if everyone who sent one called me to check I would spend six hours a day on the phone. If you don't get a bounce back assume I got it!" OK, I'll stop now.

I'm not sure if this is the first PR product pitch that's part of an RSS feed, but it's the first I've seen. Making the pitch one element in a blog about PR, however, may muddle the message. I'd like to see an RSS feed that was only the product pitches, separating the blogging-about-PR stuff from the pitches. Nonetheless, this is a smart move.

Mark Jones at InfoWorld adds some thoughts to Dan's post:

Dan's right in that we, the media, would love to see more PR people publish product and company news via RSS. Ultimately I'd like to see PR companies offer RSS feeds for specific technology categories. For example, Scott Tyler Shafer could use an RSS news reader to subscribe to networking, storage and processor press releases from the PR firms he knows. Ephraim Schwartz would do the same thing for wireless and enterprise applications, Paul Krill for app dev news, and so on through the reporting ranks.

The big message that marketing folks are just beginning to realize is that RSS helps people (including journalists) cut through the messaging overload. Speaking for myself, less than 5 percent of the 400+ emails I get every day actually contain relevant, targeting pitches from PR professionals. And interestingly enough, those "good" pitches also tend to come from PR people I know. The rest of my mail, btw, is mostly spam, email newsletters, irrelevant pitches and internal company memos - it's all very deletable.

So, when it comes to digesting RSS feeds through a news aggregator - I currently use Bloglines because it's completely web-based - I have a list of carefully chosen sources of information. I don't have to sort through spam and irrelevant messages. I don't have to politely turn down the many PR people who don't understand InfoWorld's technology news-focussed mission. It's efficient, targeted, and from the PR person's point of view, there's a very low chance I will delete or overlook the message (unlike email).

PR folks - let me know if you're developing technology-focussed RSS feeds. It's time to leave the email pitching mess behind.