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?
