Open The Dialogue

Wake up, publishers, developers, and PR people. RSS doesn’t mean a thing to the “users” of the Internet.

This morning, Adam Ostrow published an awesome essay at Mashable! about RSS and its (mis)use, entitled “RSS Needs An Easy Button,” and I seriously couldn’t agree more. If I stopped doing all the other great work I get to do at this agency and focused on one part of it, it would be the inclusion of, and education on, RSS to the masses.

When I say the masses, I don’t mean those of us probably reading this blog, Mashable!, TechCrunch and a host of others. I mean my mom, my sister, Chris Thilk’s family, and those of all of our friends and family who use the Internet regularly but don’t have a clue what that little orange (or whatever) icon means and how to use it. To this day, it still continues to fail to work like 99% of the rest of the Internet does when you click on it, and only those who have those RSS links take you to a page explaining RSS and offering a host of feeds and ways to use the feeds manage to take a step towards solving this problem.

Sure, a lot of us are using RSS feeds every day, and we know how powerful it can be and how it truly allows you to scale on a huge level. Every single “boot camp” that our DialogueMedia team does with an MWW Group staffer or a client’s PR / marketing team that goes through RSS is met with an “OMIGOSH, howcome I wasn’t taught about how to use this in college?” when it’s people fresh out of school or “WOW, so I can subscribe to ALL of this content, sort it, and manipulate it this way on my mobile, desktop, or on the Web?” And yet, unless you’re running a new versioned browser (and trust me developers, the MASSES are not using IE7 and unfortunately not consistently using Safari or Firefox or one of the others that knows what to “do” with RSS once it’s clicked on.

Back in late 2005 I slammed the people behind the “redesign” of the RSS icon to the nifty little square most of us are probably seeing in the address bar right now, and how they were missing the point. Well guess what, nothing has TRULY changed. It’s two and a half years later, almost, and what HAS changed? Well, anyone with a new browser is at least greeted with a page showing you that there are ways to use it and it doesn’t react by throwing a ton of code up on the page. Other than that, it might work sort of like a multimedia link does, opening up a second piece of software if a feedreader is installed on the computer, or if Outlook were auto-configured to snag feeds when people clicked on them. Oooh. And RSS adoption has moved like molasses that’s going slightly downhill rather than on a flat countertop.

At the end of the day, I am not sure what the best “solution” is for this problem – which is widespread, frankly – but I think it’s up to a lot of “us” to figure it out. Publishers and developers need to consistently have an “explanation” for what it is on their site, or an easy link, and that should come out of the box with blogging and CMS software. Major publishers need to either better explain how people can get their news and information on their terms. Sites like Yahoo! and AOL’s portals do a great job of incorporating RSS use into their “My” pages, but not everyone is sure that that’s what they’re looking at – great start, but there’s more work to do.

This last part begs me to ask the question as to whether publishers and others are lax to move on RSS as a subscriber option because they know that right now, the “masses” are still coming to their site, clicking around, surfing through this and that, and that would all but change significantly. Obviously I don’t want to be so cynical about it, but could that be a reason, or will that be a reason of concern once the advent of RSS and its true impact reaches a boardroom somewhere?

From a development standpoint, I’m not sure what needs to be done, exactly, but any way to make it a little less “odd” of a thing on the page – and trust me, having it in the address bar is nice, but people STILL don’t know what to do with it – would be my best recommendation.

As far as PR people go, why hasn’t RSS gotten its due in every single “tech & lifestyle” section of every single daily newspaper in America, and I’m not talking about in the “ask a question” column? Want to get people to start using it and be able to hold their attention better? Let them know it actually exists in the first place. RSS, in THIS form, isn’t SUPPOSED to be invisible, at least not yet. Get it to the point where when you say “RSS,” “feeds,” or something like that a blank stare isn’t the response when you’re speaking with people are pretty big Internet users but not super technically savvy. RSS can distribute to my TiVo, power your My Yahoo! page, and make widgets work left and right, but until someone has a clue of what to do with the damn link on some crazy large percentage of pages on the ENTIRE Internet, its usage will never be what it should be.

I’m sure everyone who has devised and executed a social media campaign, particularly one involving outreach to writers of blogs and other sites, has been asked to provide some sort of metric to justify such efforts. Often what’s asked for are pageviews or visitors or (gulp) impressions.

But here’s the story I tell all the time when people ask about my personal site’s reach: I get, on MMM, about 800 hits to the site a day. But a good amount of those come in, via searches, to posts I wrote months, if not years ago. So if you’re including MMM in your blog outreach plans and you’re basing its inclusion on that 800 +/- daily visits, you need to know that not all those 800 people are coming in through the front door.

That means some portion of that overall number of people are not seeing whatever you’ve just pitched me – yet – though some of them are. Unlike overall visitor numbers we can tell who’s hitting the front page. That is one advantage of the web versus traditional metrics like overall circulation – we can see how people move around on a site.

The 1,000+ people who subscribe to my RSS feed, though, definitely are. That’s because via the feed they’re always seeing the most recent content and updates, and they’re seeing them at a time of their choosing, whatever time they’ve blocked off to catch up on their reading. But I don’t think RSS subscriber numbers is something that’s often asked for or included when measuring success. This despite the fact that, based on my experience, far more publishers make their RSS subscriber numbers visible on their sites – largely through a FeedBurner chicklet – than make their site visit stats publicly viewable.

The same rings true here on OTD, where the number of people snagging the RSS feed vastly outstrip the number of hits to the site.

Considering there’s such a demand for numbers as a means to justify online public relations efforts; and considering there seem to be more publishers who use that FeedBurner number on their sites; and considering that number translates into a higher percentage of the audience that’s going to see the successful results of your outreach, I think it’s past time to start factoring RSS numbers into the numbers agencies provide to clients.

Now I’ll be the first to state that swapping one number for another does little or nothing to address the fact that influence in a particular vertical niche or community held by one person does not always correlate to certain numbers. But aside from anecdotal impressions given by those familiar with the online space there isn’t much we can do to back that up. Numbers are always more reassuring since that’s how traditional media has always been measured and that’s what people are looking for.

So as long as it’s numbers being asked for it’s incumbent on those of us navigating the online space on behalf of our clients to provide the best ones available. Considering all the factors above it seems to me RSS subscribers is probably one of the better numbers we can provide.

The full- versus partial-text RSS feed debate has been one that has simmered in the background of the online world for years now, occasionally flaring as people decide to make known that they’re unsubscribing to X site because it’s a partial feed or whatnot. The passions on this issue usually run high and everyone believes they have the key to understanding why the other side is wrong.

I bring this up because of the recent switch from full to partial feeds on the Freakonomics blog following its partnership with the New York Times. The blog is now hosted on the NYTimes site and many readers have apparently voiced their criticism of the switch rather loudly. The authors have tried to explain what happened a couple times but now author Stephen J. Dubner has written what may be the best rationalization of partial feed publishing to date.

Dubner explains that advertising is sold on the NYTimes site based on page views. So putting out full-content feeds would cut into page views, thereby decreasing the paper’s ad revenue, thereby decreasing the pot of money that the Freakonomics crew gets a small cut of. He states this is not selling out – that the content is still free – you just need to come to the NYTimes site to read it. Yes, the paper could sell ads in the full feed but they chose not to based on their own comfort level as well as that of their advertisers. In the end Dubner says the resources they now have access to at the NYT are valuable enough to them that they feel the partial feed decision is worth it.

It is, as Dubner says, up to the reader to decide whether they’re willing to pay the cost, the exposure to advertising, to read their content. If not that’s up to them. Whatever each individual’s decision might be I think Dubner and the team there is to be commended for providing such a logical and compelling explanation of their thinking to their readers.

Over the weekend, Dave Winer posted a link to Sue Polinsky’s item at Download Squad about RSS, where she asked “Why do you care about RSS?” in her title. She mentions some things that I see every day, about how you really don’t have an event without something about RSS being mentioned, and has the same attitude that Chris and I do about it – once you really start using it, you kind of don’t know how you used it beforehand.

A few days ago, I showed someone how I read my feeds on my laptop, to scan headlines and find news for posting in our fun and exciting Links Of The Day posts, on my other blogs, or to just keep an eye on what’s going on any and everywhere. It’s a rough task made simple, and while it’s hard managing hundreds and hundreds of feeds, RSS helps you realize that you don’t have to read *everything* nor do you have to go to those hundreds of Websites individually, like you used to, it’s easy to grasp how powerful of a tool RSS is – and that’s just the simplistic way of looking at it as the solution for news and information distribution to readers. So, I’d ask that you post why you love RSS, either here or over at Polinsky’s Download Squad post.

Here’s an interesting idea from David Singer, the guy who runs the VodkaFish blog. With AOL shutting down a number of the Weblogs, Inc. blogs (including AdJab, which Tom and I wrote for regularly) it would be fascinating to see the downward curve as people unsubscribe from the RSS feeds for those blogs. Not everyone, as he says, is going to automatically go and delete their subscription, it might take months before people get around to it. After all, there’s no additional cost to subscribing to a feed so it doesn’t really matter. I’d love to see this kind of report since I think it, as much as anything, would show how regularly maintain their feeds.