Aaron Worsham

Explaining what RSS is to most people is a bit like explaining baseball’s infield fly rule to casual observers.  There is futility in even trying because to get it you have to be more than a casual observer.  Similarly, if I was to say to a casual web surfer that RSS is a way to read a website’s content without having to go to the website, it won’t really make much sense because being a casual web user means surfing from website to website.

The good news for anyone confused by just what RSS does is that, according to Forrester Research, you are in very strong company. It seems that adoption of this federated method of content consumption has begun to level off, putting into question assumptions about how most people really do want to ‘consume’ web content.  They claim that usage of RSS is only 11% and that only 17% of the 89% still not using it are even interested.

Lifehacker has a short blirb on Forrester’s paper, sparse on details and quick to the point.  I found the comments, however, to be highly illuminating.  Reading through the threads, I tried to keep score on the points pro for RSS and pro site vists.  Here is the breakdown of the 82 different threads at the time I was looking at the post.

Pro RSS

• Saves time
• Increases total amount of information absorbed
• Way to avoid ads

Pro Visiting Site

• Enjoy the look of a site
• Want to see all pictures related to an article
• Want to read comments
• Editorial control of content
• Quality vs Noise
• Limited duplication of information
• Surfing relieves boredom

These are some points I drew from this data.

First, LifeHacker draws a technical crowd with Pro Site Visitors mixed in.  It didn’t surprise me that the majority of commenters were pro RSS.  I was more surprised by the commenters in the second camp and their diversity of reasons for not using RSS or used it sparingly. If a technical blog like LH has a good sized representation of Pro Site Visitors, it lends anecdotal evidence to the research numbers.

Second, advertisers want Pro Site Visitors.  When you visit a website, you have lent your attention to that provider.  Those in the second camp are interested in quality over quantity & Signal over Noise.  They want the experience of your website and that includes advertising when done unobtrusively.  The Pro RSS group is more intent on absorbing data without distraction.  Quantity and time are their biggest action items and advertising gets in the way of both.

Lastly, RSS was never the right solution for mass consumption.  Have you seen a professional hot dog eating contest?  Nathan’s is famous for, during 4th of July in the US, promoting people stuffing hot dog after hot dog into their mouths within a ten minute dash.  Anyone ever see this and think ‘Now this here is going to change the way people eat hot dogs forever!’  Fact is, most people are very happy to sit down to a casual lunch of a couple coney dogs with cheese and just enjoy themselves.  Slow? yep. Less hot dogs eaten? yep.  Am I hungry?  You bet!  The point is, people don’t always need a new way to do something.

Photo attributed to 96dpi @ Flickr CC

I have to admit, I’m a bit of a trend nut.  Like conspiracy nuts, trend nuts love to postulate wild theories for the sheer elation of occasionally (very occasionally) being right.  For instance, I was the first person I knew who spotted the correlation that the number of bacon strips on my local diner’s breakfast plate special can be directly tied to naked short sales in last week’s commodity pork barrel market (maybe not).

My RSS feeds today had the following stories listed back to back, Web 3.0 Manifesto Published, Semantic Web: Making Advertising more Relevant to Consumers, and Yahoo SearchMonkey gets Sagat, CitySearch.

I talked earlier about my personal excitement over the business potential for semantic web.  I think it will be a huge reboot for the market players who get in on the ground floor.  A quick review of these articles is only strengthening my resolve on that matter.

The Web 3.0 Manifesto, put out by Project10x, is a market research piece about where the opportunities are in this space.  Market research by itself does not a market make.  Though for 3K, one would expect the customers that buy this report are serious enough about the potential that they see the investment worthwhile.  RWW says that the report actually lists out niches where industries can stake claims on this new space.  I really want to get a look at the full report, but for now I will just have the listen to 3rd parties ‘discuss’ it.

The next article discusses Web 3.0 Conference and Expo where they looked at the Semantic Advertising possibilities, Semantic Advertising in my mind is a dressed up way of saying Contextual Advertising like those found tied to search results in google.  We have a limited form of this already, but semantic web will make this easier to do correctly.  Im skeptical about discussions about advertising models that will ‘improve’ on current models in light of studies suggesting that we have developed Banner Blindness unless the results are really highly targeted to our interests.  I’m in a wait and see mode on this one.

Lastly, Yahoo’s SearchMonkey is practical examples of semantic web in search results.  When your content is properly tagged for search bots to read it, you can get rich context results in your search engines like Yahoo.  We talked about it earlier.  While earlier reports suggested Yahoo had dropped to third on the search list behind YouTube for number of search results delivered, it may be enough for them to have highly targeted results that can be easier to monetize.  SearchMonkey is a great place to start playing around with semantic web concepts to see real world results.  Another good place to start is microformats.

Now, did I tell you about my theory involving stop light frequency charts and the price of gas?

Photo attributed to Gunjan Karun on Flickr CC