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Fixing a 2% problem
July 29th, 2005
Two (independent) articles that point to a cause-and-effect:
WebWatch - RSS: 98 per cent of surfers shun itA report from Forrester Research has found that just two per cent of US internet users are making use of RSS feeds.
7Nights: Fixing (RSS/Atom) Newsfeed Subscription
There has been a whole bunch of talk about how unusable the blogging subscription/syndication model is. The problem is that it’s not an easy thing to explain, and many developers and designers have gone and made it harder by spreading around terms and conventions that don’t really work.
I don’t find either conclusion particularly suprising - you have to consider that for most people, the cutting edge of IT usage is what they experience in the workplace, and the majority of workplaces have yet to progress much beyond basic email and file storage in the way they (fail to) exploit the potential of the systems they are using. And home computing is still dominated by a virus-and-spyware ridden AOL paradigm.
So perhaps the surprise is that RSS usage is as high as 2%?
[UPDATE: here's the original source from Forrester, and an interesting comment from The RSS Weblog - far from lack of knowledge being a problem, it could actually be a symptom of a successful shielding of the technology from those who don't know (or care) about it...]
Filed under Blogs |2 Responses to “Fixing a 2% problem”
I am not suprised either.
I am one of the 2% who abuse RSS. I do a weekly podcast (radiostatic.am), have several web pages, reed feeds via bloglines and RSSOwl, suscribe to podcast via doppler and I am sure I will find other ways to use it in the future.
I think it is the best thing since CSS and the WC3.
I think that the comment you mentioned in your update makes a good point. Most people are clueless to what it is and what it does. The problem is even worse when you use the term podcast, which is basically an audio RSS feed. (Try and tell someone that you do a podcast and have a camera ready for the expresion on their face.)
One of the podcasters I listen to is Leo Laporte (leo.am) and he made an analogy between podcast and TIVO. He mentioned that even though TIVO is really great technology, sales as sluggish. This is likely due to the fact that people have little or no clue what it does.
Many have even questioned the value of using the term RSS and, honestly, the net world can not even seem to agree on what it actually stands for. While Yahoo may be doing well by not using the term, it is certainly not going to help inform people about RSS. It is more likely that the obliviouse user is simply going to think that it is something Yahoo does.
However, I must wonder if that is only part of the problem. I know that newspaper subscriptions have dropped since the internet and many do get thier news via the web. What I am curious about is… How many people actually read a daily news source any more?
Based entirely on casual opbservations it just seems that, Americans at least, don’t care to hear anymore news other than what is on the radio and tele. It seems to me that far fewer people care to read news than when I was in high school some 20 years past. I do not doubt that part of the problem is a lack of knowing what RSS is and what it does but, seriously, what percent of the world read some type of printed (whether it be on a screen or paper) news each day?
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