One of the blogs I have in my own RSS reader and one I read each time Martin Neumann post something new is Home Office Voice. Today in a post, Martin made a statement in his post that really caught my attention.
[L]ets face it, RSS adoption has failed, and failed quite miserably with the mainstream. Its simply not lived up to the expectations and how many more years can we say that this is the year that RSS adoption will explode?
Yes, us folk who are into the tech/blogging scene can’t do without RSS but the mainstream just don’t give a [damn].
Even after all the hype and talking up those of us in the blogging world have done, the general public, those who read our blogs are not using RSS like they should be. I agree with Martin, those of us who blog are using RSS. But I wonder if those who are not blogging even know what it is.
I work with professional service providers, mainly attorneys, designing and supporting their blogging efforts. This is one subject we discuss often. First of all, I insist our clients use RSS. And for the most part, I think they do. And we always put the subscription options on their blogs too. However, it seems most people are not using RSS to subscribe to these type of blogs. If they use a subscription at all it is the “Subscribe by Email” option. Which is fine. At least you are landing in their email inbox each time you post a new post.
What bothers me however is the fact there is a huge number of our readers who are still bookmarking our blogs and actually visiting them daily to see if we post something new. These people are either spending their entire day viewing their bookmarked sites. Or they are only following a small number of blogs. Or worse, they are not visiting them at all.
As Martin mentions in his post, HomeOfficeVoice Gets a Slot in Alltop’s Small Business Section, Alltop is playing the middle man for these type of readers. However, Alltop does not pick up all of the readers out there. Which causes me to ponder what can we do as bloggers to get more of our readers to use RSS.
Quite frankly, I don’t have the answer. We all use those nice little links on our blogs that direct our readers to something telling them “what RSS is”. But that is a pretty benign action on our part.
There is no way I could do what I do without RSS. I guess I am one of those “tech/blogging scene” members Martin is talking about in his post. We have failed as bloggers to help our mainstream readers understand RSS. And we have failed to get them to use it.
Please help. What can we do as bloggers to get more of our readers to understand and use RSS?
I don’t have a real answer for you other than to note that RSS may be overtaken by a new medium. I find that I am using RSS less and less myself. I used to follow hundreds of blogs in my Newsreader using RSS. I still do check in on them from time to time but I find that Twitter is increasingly becoming my de facto news reader. Twitter is allowing me to effectively have a crowd-sourced editor that allows the really good stories to bubble up to my attention.
So as RSS use is stagnant, Twitter adoption is on the rise. Perhaps this will become the crowd-sources RSS of the general public?
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Chris — Great point. I too have noticed that I use twitter more and more to get those feeds I want to read. Twitter seems to filter out the good stuff and it shows up right in my twitter client, TweetDeck for me.
I similarly have wondered why RSS adoption has remained so incredibly low even as no less a titan than Google has made the process simple, easy and effective.
My best guess is that people simply don’t want or don’t know how to find a lot of good content on the internet. As you also surmised, most people only regularly read a tiny handful of websites (which they reach through bookmarks or their own memory), and everything else they learn from word-of-mouth.
And maybe that’s how they want it. Truth is, not everyone is an information-junkie like all bloggers are.
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I believe it’s truly that people don’t understand what an RSS feed is. For me, I JUST started using google reader within the last year maybe. It saves my life when it comes to time and all the blogs I like to read. I’ve found, though, that some of my favorite blogs don’t come up on google reader which is very disappointing. Even the “RSS Feed” link they have doesn’t work. And, I’ll be honest, I’m not sure what happens if I click “RSS Feed.” I guess I’m still new to all of this… Google Reader, however, has been a HUGE asset in my life.
Grant, one of the sites that I subscribe to displays a subscribed readers counter. Maybe, seeing that thousands of people subscribe to the site makes people more inclined to subscribe as well.
I have to admit, even I do not use RSS. And I’m a blogger. I just like visiting the individual blogs. Don’t ask me why. If I have 30 feeds all I’m getting is content content content. Which is great if that’s what I’m after. But I dunno, I end up missing the visual cues of each site I visit.
So I end up just visiting each site individually. My rss reader is lonely and neglected.
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I use RSS for my daily reading (G-reader and home page). I don’t know how would do without it, since it makes all the sites I want to read all on one page. I haven’t actually used Twitter that much, since I feel it’s just an bombardment of short texts.
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Grant,
My Google Reader is filled with unread posts – tons! I’m lucky if I get to it once a week.
Friendfeed and Twitter have become my “readers”. For those “must read” blogs (like yours (I use email).
I wonder if your traffic gets a bump on the day you publish your newsletter?
We might have to wait for better readers for the average Joe.
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This is a very good point. I wrote about this very topic last year in a post titled “6 Things Regular People Aren’t Doing on the Internet”. What just struck me today while reading your post was that there are a few blogs, one of my favorites actually, that have over 100,000 subscribers via RSS. It’s a self-help and productivity type of blog. Can it then be deduced that all of us geeks using RSS are also incredibly un-productive because of it? LOL
Frank Gilroy´s last blog post..7 Ways to Keep a New Blog on Technology Afloat
Frank – Thanks for you comment and for adding to the conversation about RSS. I also wonder if you might be right. Those of us who subscribe to all those RSS feeds, are we unproductive. LOL Today I also asked the question again if perhaps twitter is making RSS a thing of the past. Don’t know and have not decided yet.
I dunno. I think the bottom line is that RSS, Twitter, all of these tools are really just a means to an end. If they cause wider distribution among us geeks and hence raise the perceived value of the post among the search engines then more non-geeks are likely to see the article.
The next question then becomes ‘Is the perceived value of an article being artificially slanted towards the bias of the average geek because we have more tools do deal with the information overload?”
Frank Gilroy´s last blog post..7 Ways to Keep a New Blog on Technology Afloat
It is perplexing.
I wonder if you reached out to the mommy bloggers and find out what their stats for RSS followers are?
They seem to really create a following. Is it because they aren’t selling anything and just build friendships to support more blog ad funding?
Check out following #savvyblogging on twitter to get a glimpse of how this genre lives…