Really Simple Google?
Today has seen two posts about RSS feeds - Emi has pointed us towards this article, and Mike D on Unassigned Topics has an excellent post about the potential for campaigns to use RSS more effectively. I posted a link there, but I think the article I linked to deserves a more in depth discussion.
Emi's article argues that RSS is a potential solution to the problems we are all too familiar with - ever increasing volumes of spam. Many of our inboxes are so tightly monitored these days that they filter out legitimate messages along with the spam. After all, how many of us go and check our Norton anti spam box to see if anything has been over zealously put there? If people access their information via RSS feeds, they are spam free - undoubtedly a huge advantage for the internet publisher.
However, that article only touches on a far wider and more important debate being played out on the Internet - about how people acquire their information on the web. Most people currently use search engines such as Google or Yahoo to find their information. However, according this article about RSS, Google increasingly sees RSS not just as an excellent publishing tool, but as the primary source for people getting their information. In effect, they will subscribe to searches. As such, Google has started including RSS tags like atom.xml in its index crawling.
Meanwhile, Yahoo is to replace the rather user-unfriendly little orange RSS icon you see on the bottom right of your browser to indicate an RSS feed with buttons that allow you to add the feed to your Yahoo home page so that subscription becomes as easy as adding a bookmark.
For Google, of course, it is a money thing - they intend to place adverts within the feeds. But when so much is at stake for Google, you know they are going to invest some serious time and effort in ensuring they lead the way in making it easy to access and subscribe to RSS feeds.
For us politicos, it could herald a huge change in the way we communicate with our online community. If Google does produce an RSS reader that you can easily and intuitively subscribe to and manage, campaigns really could create RSS feeds on a number of topics as discussed in Mike D's blog. Furthermore, since you are viewing a web page directly, the ability to show content plus donation and volunteer pages as a single page is far greater.
The ability to move from the crude push mechanism of email to such a personalized subscription model is an exciting vision indeed. We need to be sure we are ready to take advantage of Really Simple Google...
Emi's article argues that RSS is a potential solution to the problems we are all too familiar with - ever increasing volumes of spam. Many of our inboxes are so tightly monitored these days that they filter out legitimate messages along with the spam. After all, how many of us go and check our Norton anti spam box to see if anything has been over zealously put there? If people access their information via RSS feeds, they are spam free - undoubtedly a huge advantage for the internet publisher.
However, that article only touches on a far wider and more important debate being played out on the Internet - about how people acquire their information on the web. Most people currently use search engines such as Google or Yahoo to find their information. However, according this article about RSS, Google increasingly sees RSS not just as an excellent publishing tool, but as the primary source for people getting their information. In effect, they will subscribe to searches. As such, Google has started including RSS tags like atom.xml in its index crawling.
Meanwhile, Yahoo is to replace the rather user-unfriendly little orange RSS icon you see on the bottom right of your browser to indicate an RSS feed with buttons that allow you to add the feed to your Yahoo home page so that subscription becomes as easy as adding a bookmark.
For Google, of course, it is a money thing - they intend to place adverts within the feeds. But when so much is at stake for Google, you know they are going to invest some serious time and effort in ensuring they lead the way in making it easy to access and subscribe to RSS feeds.
For us politicos, it could herald a huge change in the way we communicate with our online community. If Google does produce an RSS reader that you can easily and intuitively subscribe to and manage, campaigns really could create RSS feeds on a number of topics as discussed in Mike D's blog. Furthermore, since you are viewing a web page directly, the ability to show content plus donation and volunteer pages as a single page is far greater.
The ability to move from the crude push mechanism of email to such a personalized subscription model is an exciting vision indeed. We need to be sure we are ready to take advantage of Really Simple Google...
2 Comments:
Do you think RSS is mainstream enough for every day users to use it? I know it has "simple" in the acronym, but I think the majority of users are very unfamilar with RSS technology and it's uses.
While it could be a great outreach in the future, I don't think the technology is there quite yet. Everyone knows what e-mail is (unlike say 1995), and maybe by 2010 everyone will know what RSS is and will be able to use it for the 2012 Presidential.
Just my 2 cents...
Like any new technology it just takes one Presidential campaign to utilize RSS in order to make it mainstream. With elections as close as they have been any campaign that does not take advantage of any avenue to woo voters is likely a losing campaign.
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