Yesterday I attended the Kentucky Press Associaton Convention in Lexington and myself and my editor and our boss attended some seminars. On of them was on blogs, podcasting and RSS and how they are "invading our office space".
This particular seminar was conducted by a fairly well known syndicated columnist named Don McNay. His web site is linked in the title. The seminar was attended by many young people and a few "suits" that were looking at how to stay ahead of the game.
Anyway, the discussion of RSS(Really Simple Syndication) was focused mainly on text and I think that it's just silly to use RSS to go out and pull in your news so you don't have to visit a web site. Many news web sites offer RSS feeds so that you can "subscribe" to online news articles and have them pulled into one place for you to read. No pictures, no ads, no visiting a web site, just the text.
The advantage is that you get only what you want to get. However, in my opinion this is just overkill. My editor and I talked to a few people about RSS for news and the analogy I came up with was the history of cooking.
We started out cooking over an open flame. Then the stove top and oven were invented and finally we got the microwave oven.
In news, the newspaper is the open flame, TV is the oven and the internet is the microwave. So what RSS feeds are doing for text-based news is satisfying the few crazy people in this world who believe they don't have time for the endless seconds of a microwave. So they want something that can pop some popcorn in 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes.
While it would be great for grabbing the stories or columns done by a favorite writer, grabbing the top stories from large daily newspapers and CNN.com will bring you in nothing but the same AP story over and over again for 70 percent of the news. I'm sure you could refine your choices down to getting only local stories from different newspapers, but just visit the stinkin' website. You never know when you might stumble across something good. And besides, photos, design and color make getting the news enjoyable. Straight text is so early-1900s.
RSS simply paved the way for citizen journalism and especially podcasting. You know that newspapers are going to have news on the net every morning, news websites update by the minute, but people like you and I who have blogs or podcasts don't always get to update that frequently. And either way, most people don't have tons of blogs they have to visit so most just click their bookmarks and if sites are updated they'll read, if not they'll leave.
A few people will use it, but even though it's a "buzz-term" and really hot right now, few use it for grabbing news.
In fact, if any web site ever set up most or all of their content to be subscribed to through RSS is probably setting themselves up for a problem later on. How exactly can you guarantee advertisers that people will visit your site if you are offering them all of your content through RSS?
With RSS they don't have to, you are offering them a way to not visit your site.
Even with that being said, the bottom line is that RSS will forever be linked with podcasting and using it to get text will be a footnote, at best, in its history.
Unless they radically change it somehow. Then I reserve the right to change my opinion.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
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I can see you could make your RSS pull in some feeds to stumble across stories and that's perfectly alright, it's just not my cup of tea. I like photography and graphs and in my area I like to see who is advertising online.
And honestly I haven't really looked too far into it, but RSS has been around for a while and in this region you might be lucky to have a half dozen subscribers to news RSS feed. The Cincy Inquirer has like 16 subscribers to its top stories. Hardly worth the effort in my opinion.
I was in a room full of people who were looking at how RSS feeds could help their newspaper's web sites. And by helping I mean make money and frankly I can't see how RSS can help any web site make money if it isn't linked to a podcast.
Posting RSS feeds doesn't help to bring hits to a web site and therefore advertisers aren't get the best bang for their buck.
RSS is for reader convenience, but from a business standpoint it has its disadvantages.
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