The Future of RSS is Not Blogs

notepage writes "Blogs vaulted RSS into the limelight but are unlikely to be the force that sustains RSS as a communication medium. The biggest opportunities for RSS are not in the blogosphere but as a corporate communication channel. Even now, businesses that were initially reluctantly evaluating RSS are beginning to realize the power and benefit of the RSS information avenue. The inherent capacity for consumers to select the content they wish to receive will be the driving mechanism for keeping advertisements to a minimum and content quality consistent."

Advertising

[Threni]

> The inherent capacity for consumers to select the content they wish to receive
> will be the driving mechanism for keeping advertisements to a minimum and
> content quality consistent."

You sure? Between RSS feeds and Firefox's Adblock plug in I hardly see any adverts these days! Having said that, I'd like some way of having Firefox automatically select the `printer happy` version of a story, as they're entirely free of ads most of the time.

This post brought to you by my sponsor

[Brunellus]

keep advertising to a minimum? I think not. The best we can hope for is far more targetted ads...

Technology Or Message?

[DanielMarkham]

This is the old "push versus pull" marketing discussion. Are people tired of push communications, where their email inboxes fill up with garbage? Absolutely. But the real question is how to enact a "pull" distribution system that also sells stuff. The author seems to make the point for directly replacing newsletters and other corporate communications with RSS feeds. sounds good, but I don't think it's the complete picture. The basic problem is one of personality -- most corporate communications are about as personable as a TV commercial. Impersonal works great when you're mass-distributing the message, but from a pull standpoint I think the format and method of content creation will need to change, not just the technology. My two cents.

Robot Soccer Champions by 2050? [whattofix.com]

Return Of The Son Of Push

[WombatControl]

Something about this reminds me of the bad old days of Active Desktop and Netcaster, "push" technologies that were supposed to revolutionize the way people worked on the Internet - and quickly faded into obscurity.

Corporate RSS can work, but it needs to be less annoying than push technologies were. The problem is that once RSS gets integrated into Longhorn everyone and the dog will use it just like "push" technologies - "pushing" annoying ads into everyone's faces and "pushing" the signal to noise ratio down into nothingness.

Re:This post brought to you by my sponsor

[ScentCone]

keep advertising to a minimum? I think not. The best we can hope for is far more targetted ads...

You say that with resignation, like it's a bad thing. Would you rather that the people who actually produce all of the content that everyone wants have no way to cover the costs of their efforts, obtain health insurance, or go on a vacation once in a while? Everyone seems to want some ad-free, subscription-free paradise where they get all in the info and entertainment they could ever want, packaged up just for them, at no cost. It's not just that it's unrealistic, it's that it suggests a serious disconnect between the people that consume things and the realities of producing/distributing what they consume, and what it takes to allow talented, dedicated people to dedicate their waking hours to creating it. Targeted ads are probably one of the very best approaches to keeping the content producers happily producing without everything being subscription-based and/or DRMed past some threshold of pain. And the more targeted, the more likely it is to be the ideal mix for everyone involved.

Biased What?

[vethia]

I'd be skeptical of the opinion of anyone who wrote an article to promote his or her own business. This article is published on a site that sells RSS feed creation services. The author is also the site's marketing director, as is clearly stated in her bio. The article is just one big ad for this site's product.

Re:What's the point?

[Luscious868]

Yeah... and since when did any corporation want to "minimize" our exposure to advertising.

Since the very beginning of advertising. Do you really think corporations enjoy throwing money away on advertising that isn't reaching their target audience or is otherwise ignored? If corporations can cut advertising costs by focusing their advertising dollars on those channels most likely to reach receptive consumers in their target audience, they'll jump at the chance.

RSS will replace the newswire, not much else...

[analog_line]

...because that's really what RSS allows you to do, run your own newswire.

It isn't a brand new medium in the least. What it does that is new, is make it easier for individuals to access "press releases" (in quotes, because with RSS and the like the press is rarely the target, the whole idea is customers reading this crap themselves) that previously only appeared on the various business PR newswire services.

RSS is more hype

[Virtual Karma]

RSS is more of a hype than anything else. What exactly do you understand by RSS? Its nothing but a structure that we have all agreed upon, to publish information. What makes it work is the acceptance. I can write code to extract information from a RSS document (basically XML) knowing that every RSS document will have the same structure. Now if instead of RSS it was some comma seperated file that we all accepted as the standard, my scripts will work in similar fashion. Instead of the title tag my script will look for the first value in each line. Instead of description tag my script will look for the second value in each line. So RSS is nothing more than a standard that we all have accepted.

Please dont get me wrong. As the author of Newster.net [newster.net] (yeah yeah.. this is shameless advertising) I really appreciate the establishment of such a standard. The standard is what makes the site work. My point is that RSS is very simple and sweet, and should be perceived and interpreted that way. Its a standard and not rocket science...

Re:Ad blocking?

[ThosLives]

Free markets would balance this out; advertising makes it not a free market. Here's why:

If the [content providers] did not get revenue from advertising, if I didn't pay the [content providers] they would have to stop producing it so I would lose the use of the [content]. If I didn't value this [content] in the first place, as indicated by me not paying, I can't complain that it went away. If, however, I want it to stay, I should be willing to pay for it directly, not indirectly through "advertising tax".

Now, with advertising, who are [content providers] really serving? In a round-about way they are providing [content] to people, but if they lost advertising [revenue] they'd go out of business. So, in reality, these [content providers] are simply subcontracted advertisers, using [content] to get people to view ads. This is a disturbing business model, not because it doesn't work but because it allows people to get the idea that things are free. It's a great ruse by the Big Companies to have you pay to [see stuff] you want (the [content]) through a middle man (the Big Companies) while they (the middle men) take out a cut. It would be far more economically efficient to simply pay the [content provider] in the first place and cut out the middle man.

Note that I don't think the above discussion applies to informational websites by Big Companies about their own products; it is understood that part of their product or service is making you known about it. Now, if I went to, say, Intel's website to look up reference information for a chipset and had to see or block or whatever advertisements for Pepsi, I would seriously wonder about what is going on at Intel's web department.