Scobleizer blogged Dwight Silverman, in Houston Chronicle's TechBlog: What's wrong with RSS. Read the comments there. That's where RSS needs to go next.
Steve Rubel links to a Nielsen/NetRatings study that points out that blog readers are not RSS readers. The benefits are there, but only highly passionate readers can see them (among influentials RSS usage is far higher -- which is what gives it its power -- at all the conferences I've spoken at this year usage is about 80%). It's far more productive to read a set of blogs and Web sites in an RSS aggregator than in a Web browser. But, it's not for everyone. If you don't visit more than 10 sites a day I don't think you're gonna be able to see the utility of RSS.
Blogging, though, gets us close -- because it increases the number of sites everyone wants to keep up on. What happens when everyone in your family has a Flickr site and a blog? How many people are in your family? At my wedding there were more than 50 family members and I don't think that's atypical. If you're trying to keep up to date on 50 people email and Web just doesn't cut it. Will you really want to visit your brother's site every few days just to see if he's posted a new picture of his kids?
I think this is somewhat misleading. I use Live Bookmarks in Firefox to see the titles of blog posts, to see whether or not I want to read those posts, but I am not using a software-based news aggregators (feed aggregation software) or a web-based newsreaders (feed aggregating Web site), so had been included in the survey, none of the five choices provided would have fit my usage.
Monday, August 15, 2005
RSS in the news
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2 comments:
Don. I have been using RSS aggregators for 2 years. I presently use Newsfire. I monitor about 300 feeds of which 100 are blogs. I just click on a RSS or XML icon and its added to my list of sites that I monitor. Its that easy
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I fully realize RSS Aggregators are a viable way to use RSS feeds, and have tried them. And that approach is one that was listed in the Nielsen/NetRatings study.
My point is that in Firefox with Live Bookmarks it is possible to see the titles from an RSS feed directly in the browser, without the need for an RSS Aggregator, and that is an option which the study did not include.
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