RSS

The Power of RSS

Kristine Lowe

04 May 2007 — 1 min read

I found this comment from Craig McGinty on Robin Hamman's blog, and I couldn't resist republishing it here, as the mind-boggling importance of RSS is one of my hobby horses:

Something any online publication has to appreciate is that their audience is no longer at the bottom of the funnel, being drip-fed news and features. Thanks to RSS (I accept it's still early days but its use is growing) people have now flipped the funnel and can vacuum up what interests them and roll their own news service.

They can stay in touch with what they want, when they want and turn the tap off once happy. Publications need to slice their content up so that people can follow sections, make it easy to follow comments via RSS or subscribe to keywords wrapped up in a feed that tells them when something new is published. It might not be possible to hit all these marks at the same time but they are worth having on the agenda.

I could say that I keep praying for newspapers to slice up their content in sections, like in why don't The Times (UK) and Börsen (DK) have media feeds available, but that would be a lie: in the end, when a publication hasn't sliced up its feed in this way, I just stop reading it...

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