Slashdot Mirror
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.