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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."
Wow -
I guess it's true, pop will eat itself. Remember when "push" internet was all the rage? Well, we all knew it wasn't really "push" at all, more like a periodic polling of "channels" of information. For a while there, Internet Explorer had a "channel subscription" feature. And there were all sorts of silly little news-ticker applets you could download and install, and then configure to pull various topics to you.
Hey wow look! It's a brand new wheel! It's round like the old one, and goes round and round like the old one.
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.
Except that this is the opposite of what most media-driven corporations are about. They want you to see ALL the ads, to the point where they want to make it illegal to skip over them.
Typically, they don't care so much about the QUALITY of the content, but its CONSISTENCY. Any decent webfarm can do that.
Look at Coca-Cola or Pepsi or Sony. They want to bombard you with ads, over and over again, forever. They're not going to allow you to select only the ads with the hot chicks, or turn ads off after 9pm.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So, the author (who sells RSS software) suggests that companies create PR/advertising feeds and that people will sign up for them? Interesting. Not very different from email lists except that customers could actually unsubscribe. Great for the customers, and legit opt-in businesses stop looking like spammers. I don't think I'll be signing up for them, but I'm sure someone will want to subscribe to Best Buy's marketing list.
But that's totally different than most blogs. Blogs are about self-publishing for people that don't create full websites. They're not for advertising a business unless the business can't afford a cheap webmaster.
Blogs as content sources and RSS as advertising feeds have totally different purposes. One won't replace the other, because they don't do the same thing.
And RSS won't help content publishers (like many bloggers and newspapers) because it circumvents advertising. Great for the customer, bad for the revenue stream. Unless you build so much trust and traffic through RSS that you get more traffic to your website. But how do you advertise the RSS feed to people that don't visit your website?
Personally, I don't see RSS being that revolutionary. But then I'm not selling it.
End rambling.
Let's see--it's an article on how RSS is the future of business communication, hosted on a site that sells business RSS services, written by the site's owner, and submitted to Slashdot by the author.
Then fed to me via Slashdot's RSS feed.
Yep, that's the future of advertising via RSS if I ever saw it.
Speaking of RSS, I just made a voice RSS Browser yesterday. The source code is available to download and the program will let you turn just about any RSS feed into an IVR in less than a minute. http://www.pbxfreeware.org/
I agree. But it won't last.
With email spam, a business has your email address (think large opt-in companies rather than viagra selling spam worms). They can potentially use your email address to find out more about you - where you live, what you earn, and other demographic information. That lets them target ads to you. You get ads more likely to make you act the way they want you to.
With RSS feeds, they know nothing about you (except an IP address at best). They can't target you. They don't know who they are. If you don't come back to the feed because you drop your subscription, they don't know why... Actually, they don't even know that. They don't know what the turnover is. They have no way of gauging the effectiveness of the feed. They can tell how often it's accessed, but there's little to no accurate way they can tell what drives sales.
You can do that with email, just as you can with physical mail. You send one version to half of your accounts, and another version to the other half. Watch your sales and see who buys more.
Does anyone think big business will buy in to a model with no feedback for the long term?
Bear with me a second. There's already a movement underway to create "structured blogging" (which really needs a better name), and Microsoft already has a similar concept, where you attempt to state up front what is in an RSS item. So say that you're watching new movie releases at your local cinema, then you would be able to tell that each item might have title, stars, description, rating, and show times. It's really not hard to make that leap, it's the same argument people make now for the "Semantic Web" (and hopefully will be adopted quicker as we learn our lessons :)).
Great, so now I'm in a position to have a piece of software on my machine that is watching that feed for new movie releases. It sees that a new Shakespeare movie is opening this weekend, so it alerts me on my cell phone to this fact and asks for permission to go ahead and buy the tickets. Or maybe, if I have a properly enabled phone, it sends me a link where I can do it for myself. Like I said, this isn't going to happen tomorrow, but there's nothing technically stopping it.
Or how about a froogle watcher that keeps track of the average price on item X, and then knows that when it spots somebody offering more than 30% off that price, it goes ahead and buys it (again, or alerts me so I can do it). Even better, it spots it cheap, buys it and then immediately puts it up on ebay at a profit for automatic flipping.
Or a weather agent that sees, at 3am, that the hurricane has changed direction and is now headed straight for my hometown, so when I wake up at 7am there's a message waiting for me that maybe I should cancel my golf game.
Or a traffic monitoring agent that sees a truck has rolled over on Rt93 south, and tells my alarm clock to wake me up half an hour earlier so that I can take the backroads.
Is there anything special about RSS that enables any of what I just said? Nah, not really. It's more about the notion of polling information feeds and being able to automatically act on them. There's nothing new under the sun there. The question has always been one of technological adoption. You can't create the perfect technology and then tell the world "Why won't you use it!?! Use it now!" It has to prove itself, and grow over time. So if it takes going from blogs to RSS to Structured RSS to Smart Agents, I can wait.
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