RSS

One of the hardest things to wrap my habits around is one of the easiest things to wrap my head around: RSS.

Really Simple Syndication, which I’m going to use here to stand in for any web syndication format (Atom…things I don’t know…), is what I would call the key technology behind blogging and Web 2.0. But it still hasn’t found a proper outlet yet, and that’s keeping people out of the technology who ought to be let in. The more invisible RSS itself becomes, the easier and more powerful it will be.

I’m no stranger to technology, the internet, or the blogosphere, but I still don’t like my feedreader. Yesterday I went through my list and added each of my favorite blogs to my bookmarks menu, and today I simply clicked through the list, reading whatever was new. Guess what? It works even better than I would have expected.

I’m beginning to think that RSS is a tool best suited for video and audio, not for text.

I would rather see a blog with my browser. Each blog has its own look and style, and seeing that is part of the context of reading someone’s blog. Using a browser lets me click through to important links without opening another application or creating navigation issues. Also, using a browser avoids the full text / partial text feed issue.

On the Blog Business Summit blog, Byron wrote:

The pundits that insist it’s full RSS or nothing aren’t thinking like a business that wants eyes on the page to see the ads, experience the brand, and buy product. Scoble doesn’t care if I ever see his site, but the NYTimes does, so does a blog that’s an online store.

The problem with feeds is that they takes up a weird limbo in web-space. It doesn’t make sense to serve people a little bit of text, and then make them click through to a web page where they could have gone in the first place. Similarly, RSS, like the physical waves that carry radio, is not a moneymaking medium in itself. For bloggers and businesses, it needs to become invisible, like it is for podcasters in iTunes.

Fred writes:

The data is pretty clear about this. The publishers that put only an excerpt of their posts/stories in their feeds get pretty low click thru on those excerpts. Those that put the full post in get a lot more readership.

So the trick is to figure out how to monetize RSS right in the medium, not as a way to send traffic back to the web where it can be monetized with the traditional web techniques.

And he’s right—RSS needs to find its own medium, where it makes sense to monetize it. The web is here for text. If my bookmarks bolded themselves when the site was updated, I’d have literally everything I need without any special add-ons or separate applications.