RSS Marketing Without Blogging – Nooked

I had heard of Nooked a few times over the last year, but it was only today that I finally got round to signing up for a test account.

What is it with Sligo and software companies? Is there something in the air up there that attracts them?
What makes nooked interesting is that they offer a service for sites and companies that do not have an RSS feed already builtin. In fact you can actually create an RSS channel using their service for any pages you want.
That’s pretty handy if, like me, you don’t want to spend a lot of time looking for a solution but would prefer to focus on making use of one.
Signing up for an account is quite easy, but the form is a little confusing. As I wanted to simply play with it I didn’t want to use a company name (I get enough sales calls already – thanks!), but there was no simple “I’m not a company” option.
There’s also an option to upload a company logo, but no information on what purpose it serves nor any information on accepted format, size etc., (there’s also no way of adding the logo from within your account after signing up)
After signing up for a free account you can login and start using it immediately. While this is a good thing in some ways, it could lead to abuse of the system as there was nothing to stop me from setting up a feed purporting to belong to a competitor and then publicising it. Due to the nature of RSS it would not be particularly hard to slander or slur someone via rss and then vanish.
Maybe that’s being paranoid, but basic account verification is never a bad thing.
Adding a feed is quite easy, though the choice of categories is a bit bemusing, as they don’t seem to be in any logical order.
Once you’ve created a “feed” you can then add content to it via a simple web interface. So, for example, you could easily create a custom feed of your favourite blog posts, or particular pages on your website etc., Use your imagination
The free version of the service isn’t bad, but it does have some issues.
For example if I want to let the world know about my shiny new RSS feed I should include a snippet of html / javascript on my site to link to it. Simple? Well it would be if the code provided was correct:

If you follow that link you’ll get sent to news.com, which obviously has nothing to do with my test RSS feed!
It should be:

I’m not 100% sure which market these guys are aiming at, but I would presume that the not overly technical.
If that is the case they really need to do some work on the control panel interface.
There is absolutely no documentation that I can see. After logging in you have to guess your way around, which suits me fine, but would probably alienate quite a few non-technical users.
Internal navigation is quite poor and there is no “home” link in evidence. The session also seems to timeout quite quickly forcing you to login again.
The free version is useful for those sites that do not have an RSS option, as I mentioned, but if you are looking to take full advantage of the system you will have to pay.