As businesses adopt RSS and consumers experiment with feeds, popularity of RSS will grow. Ultimately, consumers are driving force behind technology. The convenience of RSS and increased popularity will set a precedent for consumer expectations. Businesses using RSS as a communication vehicle are able to create keyword-rich, themed content, establishing trust, reputation, and ongoing communication with current and prospective customers.

The big consumer benefit to RSS is that consumers opt-in to content of interest, totally controlling flow of information they receive. If quality of content in feed declines, users simply remove feed from their RSS reader and they will not receive any additional updates from that source. The RSS reader acts as an aggregator, allowing users to view and scan multiple content streams in a timely fashion.

Consumer expectation will drive businesses that are slow to adopt. Ultimately, RSS will be a standard, like email addresses and websites are now a "must" for businesses. RSS feeds will join their ranks.

Unlike blogs, businesses can easily justify RSS feeds, as they will be increasing customer and corporate communication. RSS will create new revenue channels. RSS has potential to help companies develop strong relationships with consumers and create brand loyalty. RSS Feeds will draw existing customers and prospective clients, translating to a new or renewed income stream. Businesses using RSS feeds as a communication medium to notify interested customers of specials, discounts, product announcements, technical support tips, news and industry studies will ultimately sustain RSS as a viable and valued communication medium.

Memory Size The size of an mp3 depends on two things, quality and length of track. A good rule of thumb when deciding what size you’ll need is you’ll usually get about 1 min for every Megabyte (Mb), or approximately 200 songs for each 512Mb you have of memory at an average to good recording quality, at that size you’ll be able to store around of course you can get much more, or less by altering quality of track. Another term you’ll see around is a Gigabyte (Gb), a Gigabyte is a measure of Megabytes (Gb), where 1Gb = 1024Mb. And if you’re wondering why its 1024Mb and not 1000mb… ask your IT support!

I take my mp3 player everywhere with me and only usually hook it up to my computer to add new music about once a week and like to have as much on there as possible, so I opted for a Sony 20Gb hard disk model, but if you simply want some entertainment while at gym you might want to save yourself a few quid and go for a cheaper solid state unit.

Battery Life Another thing to look out for when buying an mp3 player is battery life, until fairly recently average battery life for one of these units was around 4-5 hours max, but new developments from companies like Sony and Microsoft mean you can now get a battery life of 30 or even 40 hours between charges.

Be aware, some very popular units only sport an average battery life of about 4 hours, this can be very annoying, make sure you check facts before you buy.

Portable Storage Many players these days allow not only storage of audio files but also any other computer files you might want, connected simply with a USB cable, so it’s can be a handy way to transfer your files between home and work.

So what’s next? As mp3 player technology becomes advances there are more and more features being added to these units, some later generations of IPod for example have built in digital photo albums; you can download your pictures and flick through them on move. Whereas other units have incorporated analogue radio and even DAB digital radios receivers. On a side note, mp3 player sound quality is only as good as headphones you listen with, I’d personally recommend spending a bit of time and money here, difference in sound quality and clarity you’ll get from a pair of Shure e3c earphones for example far outweighs cost of around £99. You can see a large variety of different units at different costs at my favourite comparison site www.wangled.co.uk

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