I'm stating the obvious here, but it's an undeniable fact of life: We're born, we mature, we die. The old are replaced with the young, and life goes on. If that sounds a bit callous or overly dramatic, it's only to make a point: Internet marketing trends follow the same path.

I put on my prognosticative binoculars the other day and surveyed the Internet marketing landscape. I saw one trend that is rising, another that is reaching maturity, and yet another that seems to be fading away. Here, you look through the lens for a moment. . .

RSS: Content publishing's rising star

RSS, which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is fast becoming a mainstream online publishing medium.

For those who've not heard of it, RSS is basically an electronic feed that sends content (marketing messages, news, etc.) to the recipient through an easy-to-use software application called a newsreader (or news aggregator), which looks very much like an email interface.

Users can set up their RSS reader software to automatically download content periodically, or they can manually pull it down to their computers. Content appears in graphical format with pictures and fonts, just like HTML (because it is HTML).

While RSS has long been used to syndicate news content, more recently it's become almost standard operating procedure for blogs. Companies are turning to RSS to issue events listings, project updates, and corporate announcements. There are RSS feeds that can track eBay listings, products on Amazon, packages sent via major courier services -- you name it.

RSS is not fraught with all the trouble email has experienced over the last few years. That's not to say there won't be RSS spam eventually, but for now, the medium is untainted. At least one company, MessageCast, Inc., has plans to use RSS as an alternative to email.

While it's still a somewhat geeky medium, that will change. (Remember, email was geeky one time too.) As operating systems begin to include RSS readers as desktop items or imbedded as part of email clients, and as users better understand what the little orange buttons that say RSS or XML mean, its use will certainly catch on in the mainstream.

RSS has long since passed the innovative stage, and early adapters are spreading its message to the online masses. I hope someone tracks just how quickly the medium will catch on from here.

Source articles for this information: A Really Simple Content Solution? | RSS: A Medium for Marketers

Pay-Per-Click Ads: Suffering from mid-life crisis?

According to an article in CNet.com, growth of paid search is slowing down this quarter. It's still growing, but not as quickly as the previous quarter. Overture revenue grew 39 percent from last year, but that's less than the 45 percent growth it saw during the first quarter.

Mark Mahaney, an equity analyst at American Technology Research, asked, "Could the search market--after explosive growth in 2002 and 2003--have reached the beginning stages of maturity, with pronounced seasonality in terms of price and volume? Probably."

While search engines are the way people use the web to find information, most clicks - 60-70 percent - are still from organic returns. Placement on the page may have some effect on that. People have been trained to look at the center column of a web page for content and virtually ignore the rest.

As the novelty of paid search wears off, I think there are two courses it could take. Either users will overcome their suspicion and begin to click on the ads just as they would organic returns, or they will ignore them much the same as they do banner ads.

The quality of the link itself will contribute to user behavior. In my opinion, there are not great expectations placed on the quality of returns in organic search results. However, I think user's expect better from paid returns. If that experience is rewarded, then suspicions may be overcome. I predict that too often that won't be case, and human nature will prevail.

Email Marketing: A trend that is dying?

Tech guru Chris Pirillo has already read email marketing's epitaph. He says, essentially, that email as a broadcast publishing medium is dead!

He is no featherweight where this is concerned either. He wrote the first book on email marketing, and has been doing it since 1996. How many of us can say that?

Chris asserts that "[E]-mail is overused as a publishing medium, and the people who are abusing it show no signs of stopping." He is one of the first of a growing number who say RSS will replace email in the not-too-distant future.

Email still has its place certainly. It's useful for business transactions, such as receipts for online payments, or to remind you if your payment is due on the credit card. Unless someone can come up with a way to do it, RSS won't replace email's personableness. That is the key to its longevity as the "killer" app of the Internet, its native ability to connect with readers by name. RSS is a way to syndicate information. Email is a way for me to talk to you one-on-one.

Email will not go quietly into the night, but I contend that its days are numbered, at least in terms of its "King of the Hill" status as the de facto publishing medium, even though new technologies like bonded sender programs and SPF will delay the inevitability of its demise. The old will give way to the new, and life will go on.

I'd enjoy hearing your prognotications. Feel free to comment.