Most commonly used on blogs, RSS is the on-line equivalent of syndication and has quickly become the distribution channel for Internet based content.

RSS is a really great transport for delivering your content to the widest possible Internet audience. Unfortunately it appears that no one bothered to tell Ireland’s top media and news organisations.

Today I spent a couple of hours in a client’s office checking in and catching up. I had previously worked with them re-engineering and formalising their business processes (yep, aside from the SEO I work as a business consultant).

We were talking about lead generation and market analysis and I suggested using a reader to pull in RSS feeds from the Irish newspapers.

I don’t personally read any feeds from Irish papers, but I knew that the Irish Times had a feed. I was pretty sure that Tom Doyle over at 2bscene had pulled this feed into a site he had created and promoted (a solicitors website which I think makes a great SEO case study – in fact so much so that I have already spoken to Tom about using in a forthcoming post).

Anyhow, I set up a Google account, loaded the excellent new Google Reader and set about finding the required feeds.

The Irish Times was the first site I hit, and I was delighted to see multiple feeds for various channels (news, property etc.). RTE.ie offered four news feeds, but the channels were a bit too broad for our requirements. From here on in things went downhill (fell off a cliff actually):

1. Unison.ie (Irish/Sunday Independent) – NO FEEDS
2. Sunday Business Post – NO FEEDS
3. Sunday Tribune – NO FEEDS
4. Irish Examiner – NO FEEDS

As a last resort I even tried Business World. You guessed it – NO FEEDS.

Disbelief is the only word that I can use at this point. Of all the Irish websites, I really thought that newspapers and media companies would understand the power of syndication?

To be quite honest, I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised – the more time I spend looking at Ireland’s on-line ecosystem the more I see just how far behind many Irish sites have fallen. (And when I get the latest .ie stats from John McCormac over the weekend I plan on writing up an analysis of just how bad the situation really is.)