I am so pissed.

Yesterday I ripped the head off of a coworker. He works in marketing on a major Microsoft product. I'm not going to identify it or him.

He called me yesterday and said:

"Hey, Scoble, we've done a fun site but no one is linking to it."

My first question?

"Do you have an RSS feed?"

"No, this site is for non geeks."

At that point I just lost it. I think I swore a bit. I am so mad 20 hours later that I can't even remember what I said.

That demonstrates an utter cluelessness about how hype gets generated. If you don't have RSS, how will anyone who is a connector build a relationship with your site?

"Why don't you get your non-geek friends to link to it then?"

I think he had heard that lots of press was reading blogs and wanted to get Walt Mossberg or Steven Levy to talk about this marketing site and figured he'd use me to drive traffic.

Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired.

I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.

Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks.

It got worse.

This site, which probably cost $100,000 (ahh, that's where our towel money went) has great graphic design. Lots of streaming video.

But it's fake. All of it is actors. No real people. No real point.

Aaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh.

Oh, but it gets even worse. "Can I download the videos?"

"No, the whole point of the site is to get people to visit and stick around."

So, let me get this straight. You don't have RSS feeds. That means I won't be able to build a relationship with this site. You have a fake site so even if I tell my readers to visit it they'll get there and feel dirty (and they can't interact or do anything there either). You won't let me download the videos to pass them around virally. Or remix them in fun ways.

Oh, and there's no permalinks so even if I wanted to link you directly to a piece of content there I couldn't.

This team is very lucky that I'm not in charge of marketing. Seeing sites like this makes me think that Mini-Microsoft is right. Maybe it's time for Donald Trump to visit the team in question.

On the other hand? Some teams at Microsoft do get it. Microsoft Presspass, for instance, just added a couple of RSS feeds.

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