By Justin Perkins
So RSS is pretty much one of the coolest technologies to come along since Al Gore invented the internet, but I'm not convinced that it's really taken off in practice. Why? Because you still have to remember to go to a website. RSS via email may be the happy medium.
Maybe some of you out there are diligent RSS junkies who slurp up morning headlines from a thousand different blogs and newspapers via RSS, but I'd be willing to wager that out of the almost 230 million internet users in North America, you're the exception.
In a recent poll I ran with Moving Ideas site users--a fairly "wonky," well-read audience--nearly 47% of the avid site users checked the box that said "What's an RSS feed?" and about 37% said "no" when asked "Do you currently use RSS feeds, either by feeding them into your site or by reading them through one of the RSS aggregator sites (e.g. bloglines)?" So we're looking at only about 16% of the site audience using RSS.
I spoke at the Grassroots use of Technology Conference on a "Web 2.0" panel a couple weeks ago, and when I did an informal poll of the somewhat techy audience, a vast majority of the 50 or so people in the room did not actively use an RSS reader, even though most of the audience knew what "RSS" means (do you?). This seems to confirm a recent report from Marketing Sherpa article stating that out of 75 million consumers and businesspeople in the USA and UK that use RSS on a regular basis, only 17%-32% of RSS users actually know they're using RSS (depending on which study's stats you believe.) Roughly 50 million regular RSS users would say, "Huh?" if you asked them what RSS was.
So what's the hold up? Why isn't this being widely adopted? Why doesn't my boss--who used to be a journalist and has been in the online business for years-- even have an RSS reader a.k.a. aggregator set up? Well, because email consumes most of the day for the majority of working internet users, and being creatures of habit, even news junkies probably only wander to their favorite newspaper site, with their morning cup of joe in hand, because that's all they have time for or remember to check.
RSS, however, from a publisher and developer's point of view has some amazing implications for syndicating content from your site around the web. Check out the little thread we have from thepetitionsite.com on Care2 to the Moving Ideas homepage. It's the little box on the right that says "take action". I have also just syndicated the same thread here:
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It's RSS that saves us a ton of time when we need to surface information on our partner sites or promote info from one section of Care2's jungle of 1.5 million pages to another.
RSS is great and all, but the coolest application of it, which has yet to surface in a major way, at least to my knowledge, is RSS to email. Subscribe to RSS feeds via email, and whenever there's a new entry, you receive an email, or more practically, a daily or weekly digest. It's a brilliant little mashup that makes much more sense than RSS alone from a user 's point of view. And that's why we have it conveniently set up on this website using Feedblitz--a free, third-party service that anyone with an RSS feed can syndicate their content through. It's easy to plug their subscription button into the code on your site. Pay a couple of bucks a month, and you can also control the branding of the feedblitz emails that push out to your subscribers.
If you haven't already, sign up for the frogloop RSS via email feeds, and you'll see from the user's point of view what I'm talking about. Once a day, you'll receive an email with any new entries in the frogloop blog. It's a great little feature to add to your site or blog for the majority of your readers who might not want to visit your site every day, or might not remember to check their RSS aggregators, but still want to stay in the loop.
If you have a different opinion about RSS, or see other implications for it, I'd love to hear about it--you can post a comment below...
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