Shakespeare, RSS, and Outrecuidance -- a rebuttal

In this article, Vin Crosbie at Digital Deliverance demonstrates his deep misunderstanding of the RSS feed and its accompanying blog technology.

He’s missing several important points, which I’ll discuss here. In case he also makes the mistake of confusing blog technology with personal journals or diaries, this link clears that up.

Like anything else, whether it be a hard-copy magazine or even an e-mailed newsletter, any item intended for public consumption must be promoted. An RSS feed doesn’t do much of that – you can’t depend on that entirely to inform the public that you’re there and waiting for subscribers. I won’t go in to the details of blog promo, but certainly nobody switching from e-mailed publications to blogs would expect the RSS feed itself to carry the entire load. It is a simple fact of business of any kind, that anything new must be promoted.

An RSS feed allows micropublishers a place akin to a shop in the mall, while a traditional, static, website only gives them a store out on the edge of town. They still need to advertise the business in some way, location notwithstanding.

Employing high-priced e-mail publishing firms will not change the fact that people don’t want to see any more spam, period. They are getting sick of e-mail altogether. Just because a number of high-profile companies still do it, doesn’t make it right. You cannot forget the consumer in the equation, when you’re making a marketing plan, and continuing to force-feed spam on people is no way to market any product. As well, while large companies are claiming big numbers of subscribers and no downturn, that’s because when people are no longer interested in an e-mailed product, they most often don’t bother to unsubscribe, they simply delete. So subscriber lists are no reliable indication of the number of people actually reading a publication.

Slamming and insulting small business owners because of their lack of big budgets, and suggesting they are somehow less valuable because of that, is not any way to make one’s own advice any more valuable, either.

The beauty of the blog is that, for now, many people are interested in them, and are actively looking for them, much like it was in the early days of the Internet. While this trend is probably going to continue for a time, it isn’t permanent, for marketing purposes. Very little online is permanent. What is more-permanent is that an RSS feed provides anyone who wishes to communicate with a large number of people the ability to do so, free of spam concerns, and with the assurance that the message will go where it’s intended to go, unhampered by unknown, unforseeable problems at the receiving end.

Not all mass communications are intended for the general public. Organizations and companies with large mailing lists can avoid e-mail glitches by making their message available to those who want to see it on the RSS feed. This really isn’t any different than sending out an e-mailed or snail-mailed message, since those receiving it are either going to read it or not, as they choose. In this case, the choice is just a little bit clearer.

The reason that aggregators will be used while Usenet and things such as Pointcast were not is that aggregators are easy to use and unobtrusive. You choose what updates you want to be notified about, and that’s what you get. Right now there is at least one aggregator I know of, Bloglines, that could be easily used by anyone who has been online before. (For reasons which should be obvious, RSS feeds are of no value to anyone without a computer and online access.)

Active Desktop and Pointcast gave me limited choices, along with a lot of stuff I didn’t want, which interfered with my other work at the computer, and Usenet has always been a mystery to me. I’ve never been able to configure it properly, so I gave up on that a long time ago. They are both completely different things than RSS aggregators.

An RSS aggregator offers the choices, which you can take or leave, and otherwise stays out of your business. You don’t even have to have it on your computer if you don’t want it there – you can visit it online and let the automatic notifier application remind you when your chosen feeds are updated. No, I don’t visit newspaper sites very often, either, unless they’ve been linked on somebody’s website I frequent otherwise. The aggregator reminds me to take a look at my subscriptions. Once my local newspaper gets an RSS feed, I’d probably look at it daily, too. I get an e-mailed update from one newspaper, but most often it gets deleted inadvertently, so I don’t see that one very often, either.

From the standpoint of the small publisher, both the RSS feed and the blog technology can be utilized at low cost, which results in a more-level playing field for anyone wanting to communicate. Both are easy to use for the publisher, as well, and require no specialized knowledge, as building a website would. With the proper bloghost and RSS feed, one person can comfortably publish a product that can be read by many thousands with the ease of sending e-mail, without the headaches.

Eventually, quality will win out. Those with quality content will be read, those whose content is not of good quality or interest to the public will be ignored. But publishers no longer need to shove their material into people’s faces anymore to be noticed, and that’s a blessing all round.