What started as an internal tool to help Ogilvy listen to web conversations about themselves or their campaigns is now public, for any dear marketer who can type TheDailyInfluence.com.

It's a "social media RSS dashboard," Ogilvy said – built on NetVibes, the RSS aggregator akin to iGoogle that many people already use to create customized feeds. And unlike Radian6, another social media listening post, it's totally free.

For that reason, and because it comes with pre-selected feeds from popular social media and technology sites, it's pretty perfect for someone marketing a tech or web product that wants to get a head start on monitoring blogs. (See review.)

More advanced "listeners," however, probably have their own system set up – or if they don't, will want to do it themselves, from scratch. Not to sound too old-fashioned, but there's a lot to be said about actually going through the process yourself.

And P.S. – Ogilvy laid off about 10% of its US workforce – or about 150-175 people (via Adweek). Some sources are saying as high as 300. WPP denied the cuts until, well, about two days ago. But this is just the beginning of thousands that will take place in WPP's agencies as clients slash ad budgets and shift dollars elsewhere, BNET writes.

The potential of RSS as a new, measurable, targetable advertising vertical is exciting. My questions, however, are in line with Jeff Marshall’s from this Ad Age article – the short term challenge is one of scale.That being said, Feedster (CPC) and Feedburner’s (CPM) respective RSS Ad Networks is a good step towards addressing the scale issue.

Ad Week reporter Brian Morrissey writes that even the relatively tech-savvy users are somewhat confused by RSS. Nielsen surveyed 1,000 blog readers and found that 2/3 had either not heard of RSS or wasn’t sure what it did. Only 11% of those surveyed used RSS.

Only 2% of online adults and 5% of online teens use RSS according to a Forrester report cited in this eMarketer article. (My Yahoo! feeds were not counted in the study.)

According to this New York Times article, RSS will be integrated into the next Windows OS release.

According to today’s VentureWire email, Ritchie Capital has launched a $20 million VC fund focused solely on RSS.

At the end of April, Google began testing its new RSS advertising offering, and Ad Week reported yesterday that Google has officially released this service (registration required) – allowing Google AdSense text ads in syndicated feeds.

Dallas-based interactive marketing services agency imc2 is adding RSS to its offerings. They will advise clients on overall RSS strategy; offer an RSS publishing platform as a supplement to direct email; and create branded private-label RSS aggregators. Definitely wins a PR award for the first agency RSS press release, but how real is this offering? "So far, no clients are willing to publicly admit they’re working with the new channel."

Another new offering that Google is testing – AdSense RSS ads (graphic and text). Not much detail – as there isn’t even a beta yet – but the article suggests that Google will introduce beta for this service in about two weeks.

RSS-generated page views up 342% over last year, and 39% over February, according to this report.