The real value of blogs
Old news really, but some bright spark has been fiddling with the Technorati API to calculate a dollar value for blogs. It’s based on the same $-per-link ratio as AOL’s recent purchase of Weblogs Inc. Cynics of course point out that AOL are great at spending pretend internet money.
Anyway, down to hard cash. This blog is worth $560, and my personal blog is worth $1,700. Not bad for blogs that as yet have no ambitions of mass readership. I’m having an eBay clearout at the moment – anyone want to buy the rights? A film deal maybe? I think Jude Law would be great for the lead role.
Now the serious bit. Blogs are a classic example of an intangible asset, a central theme of knowledge management (something that, for instance Karl-Eric Sveiby is very interested in). Some blogs are deep-freeze knowledge, thoughts and ideas encapsulated. Some present huge brand value, for instance Robert Scoble's. How much is his blog worth to Microsoft? $2m, says the tool. Personally, I’d put a higher price on it. Particularly for a company like Microsoft whose standing in the geek fraternity is not good, it’s a positive example of how blogs can present a uniquely human face.
Browse through the readers' comments to see what I mean. Some are positive, some are hostile, but all give Microsoft (through Robert) a chance to reply directly in a language customers understand. Surely that's what all enlightened companies should be seeking to do in this increasingly demanding market?
Web 2.0? Try Web 1.1
They say in the music industry that you know when a scene is past its peak because it makes its way into the mainstream media. I can't help feeling the same way about this Web 2.0 malarkey.
Newsnight had a remarkably accessible intro to Flock last night, and touched all the usual 2.0 bases (Flickr, Wikipedia, del.icio.us) without actually mentioning them by name. And, yes, it was interesting to see these new technologies presented to the public. But I still can't shake the feeling we've seen it all before. Groups of techies with laptops pulling all-night coding binges? The "hey, this is going to change everything" vibe? boo.com, anyone? The revolution that didn't happen? I may have been a tender 18 during the first dotcom frenzy but I recognise hype when I see it.
To me, Web 2.0 (God, I hate that phrase) is just the web reverting to its natural state. Like a stress ball after you let go, or the way you feel after taking off those trousers you no longer fit any more.
The early web was seized by mainstream media as another way to pipe content into everyone's life. Misguided? Sure. Understandable? Sure. 2.0 is about realising that the web isn't shaped that way. It connects people without the need for centralised content producers. Hell, that's why it's called the web.
And that's it. It's interesting, it's even exciting, but it sure as hell could do without the hype.
More:
The Web is equal to pi
The amorality of Web 2.0
Our Social World
[The following marathon post is based on live notes made at Our Social World, re-edited for context, readability, and for something to do on the train. It's more of a rundown than an opinion - the added value will follow in later posts!]
The experiment begins - WiFi-enabled laptop hastily acquired and at the ready. First thoughts are that the audience is, frankly, exactly what I was expecting. Mostly male, younger than your typical seminar crowd, a lot of Macs, some with personalisation: Flickr and Technorati stickers mostly. I've already had to give the blog elevator pitch to the taxi driver on the way over. Becoming quite proficient at it now. Probably make a post about it later.
Instantly, an interesting fact crops up: get 7 laptopped bloggers round a table and they'll all check their Gmail and not talk to each other all that much. So much for blogs enabling conversations, and God help us when the cricket starts.
Ben Hammersley is apparently the only living person to get a word (podcasting) into the OED. I don't believe that for a second. Sticking with a historical theme, he namechecks the blog A-list from 300 years ago, deeming Sir Richard Steele the first blogger. What about Pepys? Ben believes that the magic formula is:
Amateur publishing + coffee = Social revolution!
(accompanied by mandatory Che picture). His essential premise is that blogging is pamphleteering++, and I'd say he's pretty much spot on, which is why it appeals to those with something to say, and far less to the rest. However, there are some differences: a larger sphere of influence, hypertext capability, searchability (as opposed to the hordeing of printed materials) and, primarily speed.
As later speakers point out, Ben is a journalist and as such takes the journalistic angle. Revolution is in the air! You can almost see the glint of the guillotines. "The freedom of the press belongs to those who are free to buy a press," he says. "Well, we all have a printing press now!"
Simon Phipps is the brave soul responsible for the birth of blogs.sun.com. Of course some Sun-isms eke out: we're in the participation age, it's now the norm (not something cool) to be online, and this process has taken just ten years. Simon makes some excellent points about trust: we're now in a society that fundamentally mistrusts, so it's probably a bad idea to leave blogging to the PR professionals. To kick-start this at Sun, Simon had to reverse a policy that said you'll get sacked for talking about work.
"Your number one task is to write a blog policy." He also claims (correctly) that referrer logs are essential, as is the freedom to link anywhere, talk about the competition positively, admit failure and, goddammit, to tell the truth! The topic strays onto mainstream media. "You don't buy newspapers for the news. You can get news for free. You buy it because someone else has decided what you want to read - editorial view rather than content" (I paraphrase). Gasps from the media types in the room, but probably just because they know he's right.
Main topic thus far has been Daily Mail-bashing (yep, this is a liberal crowd), and the word 'bullshit' has cropped up several times. Great stuff. Out to the cricket - Eng 325-8. Not great on what looks like a 400+ wicket.
The BBC's Tom Coates gives an excellent talk on Social Software. The 'old' internet - IRC, email, Usenet, mailinglists, messageboards, MUDs - was designed to be participatory. It wasn't until the WWW that it all went askew and ended up as a broadcast and commerce medium. Tom attributed the return of the pendulum to blogs and Amazon (personally I think of old-school personalisation as a notable failure so I can't agree). There follows a brief demo of latest BBC R&D: Phonetags, where the public texts in when there's something on radio they like. They can then come back and review, tag, etc, thus providing the BBC with free folksonomic metadata. Similar is audio collaboration: allowing the public to comment and wiki-ise audio files.
From these great ideas, the conversation moves to the hoary old spam problem. How do you make social systems that aren't spammable? The general consensus? Um.. dunno yet. We're trying. I suspect whoever solves that will become very rich.
Johnnie Moore talks about "chaos and engagement". After a free-form drawing exercise, we hit the first truly controversial point of the day, Johnnie’s blog 173 Drury Lane, a consumer-driven blog about Sainsbury's started mostly out of curiosity. Some debate around the room regarding how Jamie Oliver's favourite corporation would react? Johnnie assures us they’ve not sent round the lawyers yet but, astonishingly (to my mind) there seems to be a body of opinion that they’d be justified to do so. Anyway, read the blog and make your own mind up.
Lee Bryant tackles the thorny “folksonomy v taxonomy” debate. Lee’s most interesting point is that English’s polysemy tends to be self-organising through positive feedback. Flickr tags are a great example, which tend to converge on a single agreed term (as seen with recent Hurricane Katrina photos) with time. Newspeak sprung to mind somehow.
SixApart’s Loic le Meur talks proudly about his 8 million users, and then discusses the long tail (also known to us statistician types as a ‘power law tail’). In France, blogs are creeping up this curve into the mainstream, despite predictions that the fad will die. No doubt France’s looser libel laws have helped!
Lunch: Australia 45-0. They look capable of scoring rather a lot more.
My, the BBC are well represented today. Euan Semple takes us through the principle of ‘democratising the workplace’. Euan’s experiences nicely crystallize the differences between types of social software:
Bulletin boards are noisy, quick, not for the faint of heart
Blogs are about personal space, opinion and, more and more, status
Wikis are more formal and collaborative.
Of course, says Euan, any project of this ilk is a leap of faith – not least because of the need to educate managers that the “work/not-work” divide isn’t quite as black and white as it seems. People must be given time to browse, play and experiment.
Our only female speaker is Suw Charman. Suw, although ostensibly talking about ‘Dark blogs’, offers us some valuable rules for getting business blogging. I paraphrase:
Always allow for emergent behaviour - new and unintended use.
Successful projects have a clear business need. If you have this, adoption isn’t the huge stumbling block it's thought to be.
Always look to fit blogs into existing processes. Posting content by email is a nice hacker example. Adapt to your users, don't make them adapt to you.
Avoid scary jargon. No one cares that you're “blogging” – they’re more interested in “here's the link to the page”. Go easy on the paradigm shift prose too – blogging is just a tool that helps you do your job.
Support is more useful than training. People will get the wrong end of the stick; it happens, tread gently with them.
Eat your own dogfood. If you’re not blogging yourself, forget about it.
Getting it right requires reading, thinking, playing, surfing – “invisible work”. If this is frowned upon in your business, you’re wasting your time.
Stop being so anal about RoI, and don't worry about failure.
Afternoon drinks: Two things I thought might happen, have happened. First, Australia are running riot, thumping some really sloppy Flintoff deliveries to the boundaries. Second, the Stormhoek has arrived. And (takes a swig), yes, it's rather nice. I’ll leave the florid wine-lingo description to my ex though.
Julian Bond from Ecademy has some advice for the audience: sell consultancy to FTSE, sell solutions to SMEs. Obviously my interest is in the latter market. Julian explains that there’s definite scope for SMEs to get great use from blogs through a guerrilla marketing strategy: it’s quite easy to become known as an expert in a niche area. There’s a book begging to be written there: “How to be a guru on the web”.
Personal digital identity is Simon Grice’s topic – it’s an interesting one but I’m not convinced it fits that snugly with the conference agenda. Simon talks about mobile devices as being probably the first truly pervasive identity, and the data protection implications of this. As a usual aside, if your mobile phone company pisses you off, ask them for your data under the Data Protection Act. It’ll cost them a lot of time, a lot of paper, and a lot of postage!
Max Neiderhofer’s talk is as lofty and colourful: “What makes blogging fun?” Some interesting demographic information then, for me, the observation of the day:
“Blogging is an MMORPG… the ultimate goal is to be loved and respected.”
How about another? (Max really is good at these soundbites - I’m getting visions of a range of Neiderhofer “Blogging is…” merchandise):
“Blogging is open-sourcing yourself.”
Rules emerge in any game scenario, and for blogging these rules are transparency, honesty and respect. Fail to play by them and you’ll end up being torn to shreds by the hungry blogosphere.
Colin Donald contrasted old and new media in a persuasive manner, by demonstrating the god-awful MTVOverdrive.com (old media at its clueless, broadcast-driven worst) and the small-but-quirky videos.antville.org. The connected age™ is allowing ordinary people to route around mass media, and take control of their own media consumption.
Or so it seems. I wish it was that simple. Unfortunately mass media still has the cease-and-desist firepower to crush all but the most concerted groundswell.
So far, so bloggy. Luckily, Ross Mayfield speaks up for wikis. Pointless aside: wikis are huge in Germany, but not in France. Ross sees wikis as the antidote to email decentralisation. 75% of knowledge assets exist in email. I can see a lot of applications for business support so I’ll put this on the mental ‘to explore’ list.
It’s Friday, the cricket’s still on, we’re starting to flag a little. To round things off, here’s Hugh Macleod (less abrasive than you’d expect from his blog) carrying the now-semi-famous Stormhoek. Hugh covers, with dreadful mic technique, the central thrust of his blog – the death, or at least obsolescence, of advertising. I like the (English) cut of his gib* and I’ll definitely be posting more about his work with Stormhoek.
And that’s it. I need my usual week’s gestation period now to take in some of the concepts - expect follow-ups galore. I think, in the end, that’s all you can hope for from a conference like this – food for thought, and in that respect I think it’s been a great day.
* blog joke, I'm so sorry.
A world without wires
I'm rather excited about Our Social World, on 9 September. Looks like a fair few interesting people are speaking at the conference, including Hugh Mcleod and Julian Bond of Ecademy.
I intend to blog what I can at the conference, but first I have to take the plunge and get myself wireless. Step 1) Acquire a cheap laptop. Step 2) Wrestle with WiFi. The former is in hand. The latter could, I suspect, take a fair while. Good thing I know a few techies.
A question of identity
The human race is slipping towards the intangible. Consider the evolution of commerce.
Step 1: bartering. “That’s a nice pig, want to swap for this pile of grain?” A system so fundamental that we still see children use it even almost before they even learn the concept of ‘value’.
Step 2. precious metals. Shiny things that have value derived purely from their aesthetic appeal.
Step 3: coinage and paper money. Non-precious metals pretending to be precious. In essence these are now promissory items, made valuable by a universal acceptance of remuneration.
Step 4: virtual balances and transactions. A fairly logical step – if coins merely represent value, why bother with coins at all? Hence credit cards, cheques, direct debits etc.
Step 5: e-commerce. You don’t even see the goods. In some cases there’s not even anything to see! You buy your virtual goods with virtual money at a virtual shop.
As it is with commerce, so it is in other arenas too. Telephones, instant messaging, SMS etc are all taking us away from the tradition of face-to-face interaction. Today’s youth in particular have little problem slipping in and out of many personas, both online and offline. What’s notable, however, is that as we move in and out of these virtual personas, identity is still as important as ever. In the real world we establish this by the way we dress, the things we say, friends with whom we associate. In the virtual world we adopt other approaches.
Since this identity is still so important, it’s understandable that business wants to be part of it too. It’s the essence of segmentation and the Holy Grail for marketers - after all, almost all lifestyle preferences just distil down to different product choices (Armani, not Top Man... National Trust, not Club 18-30).
An excellent article on the excellent OK/Cancel webcomic/blog/whatever discusses the two flavours of metadata that businesses want to squeeze out of consumers:
Identifying data: post code, age, income – the facts and figures.
Identity data: tastes, interests, values – the things that make us the person we are.
It's this second point that holds all the juicy stuff – our motivations, our needs, what makes us tick – and we think we keep it a big secret. I’m afraid to say we’re lying to ourselves.
I look at my Friendster profile and see a full rundown of my favourite music, a description of my interests, lots of information the marketers would love. I look at my Final Fantasy XI character and consider how much time I’ve invested in her – buying the best equipment, adding witty search comments, earning a reputation as someone who’s helpful and polite.
Why do I do this? Because these are amongst my virtual identities and I want to put my personal stamp on them. If anything, I do this even more so virtually than offline. In a commercial environment, I still feel like a customer reference number rather than a person with an identity. In Final Fantasy and Friendster I am a person, however virtual – and, you know what? I want everyone to know! I expect the first company to afford me a genuine identity will command my loyalty for a long, long time.
Yes, we’ve become abstract beings, but look closely – you’ll see that this only makes us reinforce our identity more vigorously!
Sidenote:
This overlaps with another interesting point: attitudes to real-life law and authority in a virtual world. Downloading music from P2P networks is of course the classic example. It seems to me that most of the research into this is biased towards one camp or the other, but it is widely accepted that illegal P2P downloads substantially outstrip ‘legitimate’ sales.
By evaporating into our virtual selves, do we feel that ‘physical’ laws no longer apply? Maybe so. Maybe these laws are simply not appropriate or are very out-dated. Yesterday’s MGM v Grokster ruling has reinforced that ‘real-world’ law is very much in force, but the size of the backlash has been remarkable. Maybe it just goes to show that individuals are in the driving seat of this new virtual world and resent the strong-arm tactics of big business, struggling to apply real-world tactics and business models to a very different environment.
Party like it’s 1994
CNN must be having a very slow news day. I quote*:
The Internet transforms modern life!
In 1994, people had to call the bank to check their balances. Or inquire in person, or wait for a paper statement to arrive in the mail. Baseball box scores were found in the newspaper. Weather forecasts came over the phone from the weather bureau, or on TV. Back then, most Americans still had to lick a stamp to send mail.
Then along came the Internet, and an experimental browser called Mosaic, followed by an improved browser from Netscape. And if you had a computer, you discovered a new way to this cool, new thing called the World Wide Web.
The Internet? Is that thing still around**?
*I hereby claim 'fair use' of the above copyrighted material and do not of course condone any technology or system that could theoretically be used to disseminate copyrighted material, including but not limited to: P2P networks, the World Wide Web, VCRs, iPods, telephones, paper, semaphore, speech.
**(c)"kevin", user comment on boingboing.net. I hereby claim 'fair use' of the above copyrighted material and do not of course condone any technology or system that could theoretically be used to disseminate copyrighted material, including but not limited to: P2P networks, the World Wide Web, VCRs, iPods, telephones, paper, semaphore, speech. (That should get the RIAA off my back for now).
White-knuckle infotainment
So, you got bored of five channels? Repeats of Ground Force getting too much? I see you went and got cable... very nice. Have you watched CNN yet? Or, for all you sports fans, how about Gillette Soccer Saturday on Sky Sports? If so, you’ll know the format. Scrolling tickers (usually informing me that Cardiff City have conceded another goal), newsflashes, current highlights and tables, with a minimum of 2 anchormen flashing in and out of the main window. You want information? Hey, you got it!
[CB 2018: image lost to the mists of time, but you can guess…]
Well, guess what? A recent study shows that this doesn’t work. Apparently all the scrolling text and flashing updates distract the viewer from the real message, meaning their information retention actually drops 10%.
Hardly shocking, but this has been known in the web community since at least 1996 - and yet TV networks still try to ignore it. Why? I blame the well-known melding of broadcast information and entertainment. The web is about giving users information and letting them get on with it. Television is about keeping them watching, particularly up to the ad break.
Networks believe that the way to increase the viewing figures is to make information available in a fast-paced, exciting rollercoaster format. Comprehension and retention are now secondary to the white-knuckle thrill of heady information deluge. In short, it doesn’t really matter what you understand, so long as you have a damn good time trying!
I, for one, miss the days of the stuttering vidiprinter and Ceefax, and this is why I’ll do my best to shun the pseudo-information quagmire that TV broadcasting is slipping into
Decision-making, transparency, and culture
So, the worst-kept secret in politics is out: we’re going to the polls on 5 May.
Democracy, of course, isn’t about government by the people, it’s a chance for the public to decide who will govern on their behalf. (Actually, it reminds me of the Management By Exception concept from Prince2 – a Project Manager is given authority to manage within certain limits. If those limits are likely to be exceeded, the Project Board can intervene). As a result, democratic countries demand a high level of transparency in their electoral processes. We only need to look at recent events in Ukraine to see what happens when a democratic electorate believes that it is not being told the full story.
This isn’t the only election taking place though: within the next two weeks a new Pope will be elected. This election, however, happens in a very different way; a process shrouded in secrecy, dogma and habit. So, for the spiritual leader, an opaque election participated in only by an elite inner circle; for the political leader, a transparent poll involving every adult in the nation. So why do people accept such a huge difference between these election methods?
I can only see one reason, that being the level of trust placed in those leaders. Politicians are derided at every turn (often justly!) and every move is regarded with scepticism, but religious leaders command a powerful trust from all who follow them.
The lesson: keep your decision making utterly transparent unless you are able to inspire blind faith in your employees!
Physical space and sharing
My eye was caught by an interesting course CILIP are running, entitled “Innovative use of physical space for effective knowledge management”.
The old adage crops up again and again in KM: “The smokers are the best-informed people in the office”, which my information audit work thus far has confirmed. I wouldn’t recommend buying a pack of Benson & Hedges and claiming the costs as legitimate KM expenses, but it’s worthwhile looking at how the work environment affects how people interact and use their knowledge.
Our natural day-to-day habitats have a broad mix of physical environments. There are spaces for quiet solo contemplation. Spaces for group entertainment. Spaces for learning. Spaces for socialising.
Natural habitats have both spaces for full interaction and ‘dens’. However, we spend over a third of our waking lives in working environments that we generally have very little influence over. What is particularly notable is the homogeneity of these spaces – offices, building sites, schools etc are largely similar to one another, and tend not to offer much by way of ‘natural’ variety.
As a result, the working environment has to suffice for all the various tasks we are asked to perform; and the results aren’t always successful. Trying to interpret complex statistics is very difficult while your colleagues are chatting about last night’s episode of 24 – and, on the flipside, if you need to bounce an idea off a colleague who’s up on the third floor at the far end of a tortuous cubicle maze, you’d be forgiven for resorting to an email.
I can think of some obvious steps can that can be taken to overcome these barriers, but I’d be interested to hear of more sophisticated options:
Remove cubicle dividers
Encourage staff to sit in unfamiliar desks from time to time (something I'm trying to do myself)
Hold meetings outside the office, particularly when creativity is essential
Create a 'learning space' stocked with periodicals, interesting articles, comfortable chairs, artwork, even music - whatever's required to break the norm
Stop using the phone or email to contact someone who's in the building!
Provide a 'quiet room' where staff can lock themselves away when their work demands silent concentration.
I shan’t be attending the course unfortunately – space is already at a premium in our office and we’re not in the position to make any major changes. However, it’s an interesting topic with a number of extensions. I’m particularly interested in how the design of space will apply to the virtual world (particularly intranets etc) so I dare say I’ll have some more to say on the topic once I’ve found the time and space for some quiet contemplation.
Storytelling
Storytelling
FREDDY (referring to the papers)
But what is this?
HOLDAWAY
It's an amusing anecdote about a drug deal… The things you gotta remember are the details. It's the details that sell your story. Now this story takes place in this men's room. So you gotta know the details about this men's room. You gotta know they got a blower instead of a towel to dry your hands. You gotta know the stalls ain't got no doors. You gotta know whether they got liquid or powdered soap, whether they got hot water or not, 'cause if you do your job when you tell your story, everybody should believe it. And if you tell your story to somebody who's actually taken a piss in this men's room, and you get one detail they remember right, they'll swear by you.- the “commode story”, Reservoir Dogs
Storytelling has of course existed since language began, but only now is it being used as a deliberate tool for sharing knowledge in business. Business communications are, as we know, often dry, shrouded in impenetrable language (more on this in a future post), and generally devoid of human interest. Stories offer a different perspective to this didactic and mechanical communication.
A typical story (termed a springboard story by Steve Denning) is told from the point of view of an individual who is faced with a challenge analogous to that faced by the business. The method in which the protagonist overcomes this unusual challenge helps listeners to see what is involved in a large-scale transformation.
Stories aren’t particularly good for relaying complex information. Their true strength comes from their role of ‘catalysts for understanding’; dialogues rather than lectures, concerned with building relationships rather than instructing. It’s a good idea to practice these stories and refine them over time, building confidence and learning to adapt them slightly to your audience. Remember that stories rarely get interrupted!
Criticisms of storytelling
The anti-story is a powerful and destructive rumour or denial that contradicts your story – it only needs one person to say “I was there, and that’s not how it happened” to undermine all your efforts. One need only think of the thousands of urban myths circulating the internet to realise that the anti-story is very much a self-sustaining thing.
There is also a risk of being seen to be telling a fairytale - the so-called “Janet and John” story where everyone magnificently conforms to the corporate values and, surprise surprise, success results. Listeners will rightly react against this and create their own barriers and anti-stories of their own.
Personally, I’ll admit I’m still slightly sceptical of storytelling. Perhaps I’m hung up on the term itself, which is a little unscientific and unprofessional for my liking. I certainly prefer the term ‘narrative’ which also happily moves us away from the amateurish “I can do that” approach that sometimes pervades through certain KM areas. However, I do think there is some definite value in the concepts behind storytelling. Lecturing and top-down instruction often paints too black-and-white a picture, ignoring the important human frame of reference. Even a scientist cannot describe everything in structured terms: light, for instance, can be described as both an electromagnetic wave and a stream of particles. For these situations where the facts alone don’t get the whole message across, storytelling may well be able to bridge the human interest gap.
More about storytelling
RSS: the basics
Ok, enough head-in-the-clouds talk for now, let’s have some more specifics. Call it a temporary New Year’s Resolution.
In my next few posts, I’ll be giving a simple guide to some new technologies and ideas to hit the KM field recently. They won’t be news to some, but I hope they’ll be of interest to others.
What is RSS?
Stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary - it depends who you ask. Think of it as a distributable "What's New" for your site. You may have seen the orange XML button on various sites – this is the language that RSS is written in. (Why doesn’t it just say RSS? Don’t ask me…) Clicking on it will display an RSS feed.
Today’s web browsers don’t really understand RSS feeds yet so it will look pretty unintelligible - but by using an aggregator, you’ll be able to see all the new content on all of your subscribed RSS feeds. No need now to trawl round 50 sites to see what, if anything, has changed.
Obviously this is ideal for news sites and weblogs, which operate very much on the basis of individual articles. However, pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a corporate website, revision histories of a book, latest releases on iTunes, even web comics.
How to start
Download or sign up to a news aggregator. They are almost all free.
Find some RSS feeds - some starters are given below. See if your favourite websites have the orange XML button, or a link saying ‘RSS version’ or ‘Syndicate this site’. You’ll know when you’ve found it because the page will display a lot of computer code, and the address in the browser will end in .xml.
Copy this address.
Paste it into your news aggregator and save your changes.
Hey presto! Whenever you sign in to your aggregator in future, it will tell you when this site has been updated and with what content.
RSS v Email newsletters
Of course we're always looking for the Next Big Thing and there seems to be a temptation to write off previous solutions as old hat. In this instance, the technorati are falling over themselves to denounce email newsletters and hail RSS as the new king of e-busness.
One can see why, to an extent. Email newsletters give the power to the company. Sign up for one and you are at the mercy of the editor: the content and the publication frequency are beyond your control. Email is seen as a very personal medium and many of us are beginning to regret losing control of our inboxes.
In contrast, RSS gives the power back to the user. If they want to find out about new products in your ‘Epsilon’ line, they can sign up to the RSS feed you’ve set up for that product. This will be automatically updated whenever you update your site and hence interested customers will automatically informed. You don’t need to send out a duplicate newsletter, or hope that interested parties will just stumble across your page. Nice eh?
I think it’s no exaggeration to say that RSS is the future, but it's far too early to write off email newsletters. The best ones are going from strength to strength and RSS still has a number of problems that are preventing it from reaching the mainstream.
Problems with RSS
RSS allows users to view content without advertising. Yes, you heard me right – this is a problem. Remember that the web is primarily funded by advertisers. 69% of users now use some kind of pop-up blocker – combine this with RSS’s content-only delivery and you have to wonder just how much longer advertisers will continue to hang around, and what the consequences will be for the web.
It’s also still rather technical and non-standard, meaning only a few users will have the IT literacy or the inclination to explore the possibilities. Usability will, of course, improve – after all, the web was very much like this in its infancy. For instance, the excellent new Firefox browser has a user-friendly RSS syndication feature built in as standard.
Related articles
- RSS described in plain English
- RSS tutorial for content publishers and webmasters
- Why RSS is not ready for prime time
News aggregators
- Newsgator
- Amphetadesk
- Bloglines
Some RSS feeds
- BBC
- Dilbert
- Boing Boing
- This page
- iTunes RSS feed generator
Also of interest