RSS - are the masses ready for it?
June 23, 2006 – 10:42 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Main man Aaron Brazell says People don’t want the stinkin’ RSS, in large part because they don’t understand it. He has a point. I guess I view RSS as being easy because it’s easy to me. But we all know that things that may be easy to someone in a technical field is not so simple to regular people who don’t work on computers for a living. Those are the people who have to be reached in order to make RSS even more accessible.
My man Gomer from Interwebmarketing makes a good point about his personal experience showing people RSS. They’re impressed with it, but they dont show a tendency to run right out and get it. He suggest Yahoo take the lead and use the mass media to educate consumers. Undoubtedly, that’s a great solution.
If all the major web companies teamed up to educate people on RSS you could have a seminal change. This would be an event where e-mail could be left in the dust, once and for all. RSS with many more robust features could become the standard. But this would take a lot of money, co-operation, and effort to achieve. I don’t think anyone is committed enough to consider the idea yet.
Anyways, it’s an interesting discussion and one that deserves more follow up. In order for blogs and Web 2.0 to evolve anymore, more people need to be hipped to RSS.
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4 Responses to “RSS - are the masses ready for it?”
Hey Darren, thanks for the mention of my site. By the way, I don’t do a great job (yet) of explaining the site my site in the ‘About” section so I want to take a second to do that here since it pertains to the topic at hand.
My site, Interweb Marketing, currently uses an automated process of analyzing about 300 rss feeds and splits them up into about 20 internet marketing categories.
Sure, this is a bit of a plug but it also fits into what we are talking about: making rss available to the masses. Here is an example of site that uses rss as its backbone but you don’t need to know anything about rss. Instead of tracking 300 feeds, this process will hopefully make things easier for people. Much is planned for the site and the concept, this is just the early stage of this.
By Gomer on Jun 23, 2006
Sounds like a tool that could be useful. I wasn’t sure how the articles were picked on your website. I know I show up a lot, so I figured it was hand-picked
By Darren on Jun 23, 2006
Thanks, Darren. RSS is one of those things that either you love it or you scratch your head about it. I think it will be awhile before there’s widespread adoption but more likely something else will take its place.
By Aaron Brazell on Jun 23, 2006
Darren, my site right now uses an automated process to determine which listings go in which category. Beyond that, the system is not smart engough at this time to rank listings effectively in terms of relevance. The second phase of the algorithm which will be out in the next few months will do a better job of ranking stories.
By Gomer on Jun 24, 2006