One thing I learned during Blog Business Summit is that for most people RSS is over their heads, like Goodyear blimp over their heads. This isn’t their fault, it’s ours. We, as the blogi masters, just haven’t done enough to help people get it (or "grok" it as I like to say).
Anita Campbell has an article in Inc Technology that brings it all down to this: "The simple reality is: RSS still has far too much geek factor."
The question is, then, what can we do about it? I think it comes down to two things, education and application.
First we have to educate people what it is, how it really works, how to look for it on sites, and how to subscribe. Then we need, we absolutely need to show people why it is so important. Why it can save them time and help them in their day-to-day jobs.
Anita has these suggestions for education:
- Use the new orange button. If you are still using the old buttons with the acronyms XML or RSS, swap them out for the new button. Today’s browsers, such as Firefox, auto-detect RSS feeds and will display the new orange button in the lower right hand corner of the browser when the user is on a site with RSS. You want users to see the same version of the button on your site and in the browser bar. This will help reinforce how to use RSS feeds.
- Use descriptive text links. Add a text link next to the orange button. A simple “subscribe to news feeds” text link is preferable to the rather baffling “syndicate this site” label that you so often see.
- Consider adding a description page. Give your readers an information page with a plain English description of feeds. The Yahoo study pointed out that some of the confusion users experience comes after they click on the orange buttons and either nothing happens or they’re taken to an ugly page of raw HTML. One easy alternative is to use the FeedBurner service. FeedBurner adds a user friendly page.
- Offer one-click subscribe buttons. “One click subscribe” buttons let users do just that: subscribe with one or a few clicks to automatically receive updates to your feed at one of the popular start pages or news aggregator sites such as Bloglines or Google reader.
- Use RSS auto-discovery. Add an RSS auto-discovery command to your website’s HTML, if the site supports this feature (most blog software does). RSS auto discovery lets applications such as the Firefox browser know there’s an RSS feed on your site. Then the application can alert the user that there is a feed to subscribe to.
All of these are great. These are pretty easy things we, as site/blog owners can do. Then we need to just show people that Bloglines and Google Reader can be their friends. I suggest an online tool to start people off versus an application like Attensa or FeedDemon because the medium of a web-browser will make sense to them.
On the why part … this is where just showing Google News feeds, Technorati feeds, and others are so, so important. Sure it’s cool to get headlines, but showing them how they can get that edge through sifting and consolidating information is powerful, it can be life changing. And heck it’s pretty fun when you can get the scoop on breaking news or a hot tip.
It usually only takes 30 minutes to show someone the amazing world of RSS can help them. Isn’t 30 minutes a small price for getting your information flow from a raging river to a controllable stream?
Thought so.
Tags: RSS, collaborative intelligence