RSS, Feeds, and Awareness

At the Syndicate conference in SF last Winter, (Day 1 notes, Day 2 notes) I learned that the adoption rate for feeds is in the 30ish% (The exact stats are slipping me) and the trend was on a growth pattern.

Julio observes how strange it is for companies not to offer webfeeds. Strange that companies wouldn’t try to provide the information that consumers want. I’ve heard of HTML to RSS scrapers that will convert content to RSS anyways –you can’t stop it.

Remember that nearly every modern browser will pull in feeds, even webmail accounts are showing feeds, and the next version of Outlook 12 will have a feedreader built right into it.

Perhaps a couple of reasons why companies don’t offer feeds:

• Awareness is low on Syndication and RSS
• Lack of time and knowledge to provide or implement RSS content
• Lack of understanding that the consumers are taking charge of information consumption, those who offer content in a way consumers want will bring customers closer.
• Some companies may intentionally not be offering feeds, as they want eyeballs on their site, perhaps for advertising revenue. It will be interesting to see how the advertising model shifts as content consumption goes to a pull from push model, and then how marketers will respond (and they always do)

Robert Scoble said the following at Microsoft, if I remember correctly, several folks wanted him fired after he wrote this: No RSS? No downloads? No interaction? Fake content? You’re fired! (how come comments are not visible?)

If you want to learn more about RSS, check out what my friend Robyn Tippins and friends are doing at RSS Applied. Have you ever seen so many RSS icons? Speaking of feeds, if you havent’ done so already, Subscribe to my feed.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 11th, 2006 at 4:05 am and is filed under Syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.