Intellectual Defenestration

Yet More RSS

This article in the Seattle Times has a good introduction to RSS feeds:

Trying to find what's new ... used to be a tedious process, which involved visiting dozens of Web sites and trying to remember which stories I'd read and when.

Then RSS news syndication and aggregation entered my life. This complicated set of words describing an Internet publishing method boils down to a simple concept: Web sites publish the latest updates to a formatted file on their Web site, and you use software that automatically checks that file, notifying you of any changes.

The author goes on to describe the benefits of RSS over email and email lists, specifically in terms of the ability to be spam-free and to protect the privacy of the person reading the news.

Scoble (Microsoft Longhorn evangelist) comments on the article and then goes on to explain why product teams should use RSS:

You're pissing off your customers by not having RSS feeds. Why? Because I'm a customer. I am interested in dozens of Microsoft products. I don't have time to keep in touch with you (and it's my job, imagine if you weren't someone who watched 636 sites a day). You're wasting my time if you don't have an RSS feed. Why? Because: 1) You force me to visit your site. How rude. 2) You force me to struggle to figure out if anything is changed (quick, tell me what has changed on the Spot Watch site since the last time I visited a month ago -- I've been looking at it for five minutes and I can't figure it out). 3) You have almost guaranteed that I will never visit again.

Instead, imagine a team that produces an RSS feed. I subscribe to the feed. I never need to visit the site again. If the team has something new to say (say next year when the watches start to ship) then my folder turns bold. I know instantly there's something new. I don't need to visit every week. I don't need to get mad that the site doesn't tell me if something has changed from last week.

I think Scoble's right. I simply don't visit most sites anymore unless they have an RSS feed. That counts for both business and personal uses: almost all IT news I get via my newsreader, and I simply don't have time to continuously surf the blogs I like to read to see if they've been updated.

What all this boils down to is simply this: RSS works because it makes the Internet work for me. Instead of a vast, tangled web to navigate through, I can let my newsreader manage the information for me, providing a quick summary of and route to what I'm interested in, allowing me to get on with work. And, since everything is managed for me, I can then have access to a broader realm of data than I would be able to manage manually.

(If you're reading this and you're from Baltimore and you want a blog tool that automatically supports RSS, sign up for Baltiblogs!)

November 18, 2003 09:14 AM