The Anger of Compassion

Syndicate This! ...well, I'm trying to...

Here's what Jeffrey Tucker has to say about using RSS:

It is used by only a small percentage of web surfers. Most people have no idea that it even exists, at least not now. Those who do use it, however, find that it has changed the way they go about keeping up with information. Quite simply, it puts you in the loop in a way in which you will never be if all you do is click surf click surf around the web.

He's right, basically. Surfing the web is never going to go away, for the same reason that browsing in a bookstore hasn't gone away: because it's fun. Readers will continue to patronize amazon.com and those same readers will go to a Barnes and Noble or to a great used-book store like COAS.

But more and more people will migrate to RSS, as I am, as you will, because of its power. Twenty years ago, the VCR gave television viewers the ability to watch their programs on their schedule, as opposed to the broadcasters'. TiVo takes things beyond that. Streaming audio and podcasting offer similar power to the radio listener.

So does such a simple thing as a news website: one reason, I think, that more and more people are getting their news from the web rather than from the major network news shoes is just that in using the web, people are more in control of their time. RSS adds to that control, by informing you that there's been an update to something you subscribe to, thus saving you the trouble of looking (surfing) for that update.

When a new item has been added, you can set your aggregator to show a small notification on your screen (and also set how long you want this to stay there). This way you can read the latest information as it is uploaded, and the instant it is uploaded. What this means is that you can follow hundreds of sources without actually clicking through the web. When you see something you want to look at, it is sitting right there on your aggregator. Or you can catch up on all that you missed while you were away in a matter of a few minutes (what used to take an hour).

Please understand: aggregation isn't just for techy mucky mucks and geekheads with iPods and Blue Tooth ear plugs. It can be used by anyone and should be. Mom and Dad will love it. Even if a person spends a mere 30 mins. online per day, those 30 mins. will be put to much better use with aggregation. Aggregation fundamentally changes your whole approach to viewing the web. It is like touring a country on high-speed train rather than on foot, like crossing a lake on a jet-ski rather than swimming, like talking on the phone rather than yelling.

Again, I agree with Tucker that using aggregation will change the way you experience the web, but not because you'll stop surfing. You won't. Rather, your experience will change because you've just made some tasks quicker and easier.

For content providers, though (including bloggers), the situation is quite different:

And a special note to all webmasters: don't think you can get by without enabling RSS on your site. If you don't have it, the people in the know are not reading you. You are slowly slipping off the face of the Internet. It doesn’t matter how high your Google ranking or Alexa ranking is. If you do not provide a feed, you are slowly but surely becoming invisible.

Invisible.

Think Tucker's being extreme in that prediction? Think again. Kaye Trammell, an assistant professor of mass communication at Louisiana State University, researches blogs and writes one herself. On Friday, December 31, in a post entitled, "rss, where art thou?" she wrote:

Syndication is key. I have become such a snob that I won't read a blog if I can't dump it into my BlogLines account. Okay, snob is a bit harsh. It is more about convenience. I don't have time to search out every nifty blog I come across every day to see if there is a new post. I want it delivered to me.

When I find a new blog I enjoy, the first thing I do is scour the sidebars for a link to syndication. No syndication, no subscription. The blogger loses out on higher readership & I lose out on reading some awesome posts.

Get that? If Kaye can't subscribe to your blog -- or to mine-- she won't go back to it. She won't continue reading it even though she knows she'll "lose out on reading some awesome posts."

Now, I'm no early adopter, and my rocket science degree came from the inside of a matchbook cover, but even I am doing this RSS thing. The news aggregator I'm using right now is NetNewsWire Lite, although as Tucker mentions, there are hundreds out there for the trying.

I don't have it all figured out yet, even on the reading end. I can't quite get all the quadrophebics to hook up to the wumpfwampfer, so I don't have all the subscriptions I want. And I haven't figured out how to enable an RSS feed for this blog. But this is not something a blogger can afford to ignore, so I'm working on it.

2005 promises to be a wild year for browsers (and browser hijacking), blogs and bloggers, and scripting. I can't wait.

Posted by Craig Ceely at January 2, 2005 04:11 PM