Dana posted
a link about a great article on RSS publishing on his blog
a few days ago. Immediately after I read it I contacted the author,
Robin Good,
to ask him whether he would like to contribute to the debate.
Well, he said yes ... and sent me the
very same article I'm talking about above.
Actually, the article says just about everything
about RSS ... well, not everything, but comes pretty close to it.
That at least makes my job for my next article easier:)
It's a great read ... so go ahead ...
The Future of RSS - Is E-Mail Publishing Dead?
RSS-based Information And News Feeds: Pros and
Cons For Content Distribution Through RSS
by Robin Good, http://www.masternewmedia.org/
RSS
is good
because it gives back to individual users the power to choose and
select content. This, along with timeliness, portability and cost-effectiveness,
are probably the best reasons why you should understand how and
why RSS is going to change the way you select and receive your information,
news and updates.
Is RSS Going to Replace E-Mail?
As my first
and most immediate answer I must say that the question has been
wrongly posed. E-mail is a two-way communication medium while RSS
is only a distribution one. From that simple realization, you can
immediately derive that e-mail is here to stay, while RSS may well
poised to substantially challenge e-mail in its ability to be the
best and preferred distribution/subscription mechanism for newsletter
publishers on the Internet.
The issue is still hot and being discussed in many online forums
and discussion lists, though, until now, reserved to an audience
of veteran computer users, Internet pioneers and geeks. According
to several industry analysts, researchers and technologists writing
in the noosphere,
email is soon to be dead and RSS will be the prince coming to mourn
at her death Web. Unless you go and read carefully what is being
written and sometimes easily skipped over, it would appear as if
RSS was not coming by to save or resurrect email, but to replace
her with a new way of messaging and communicating with each other.
Much of the confusion and misunderstanding stems from the fact that
RSS is an acronym that few understand, and one that has multiple
meanings (RSS stands for "Rich Site Summary" or "Really
Simple Syndication" or "Really Stops Spam," depending
upon your preference). RSS is also something that once you have
read its description, you know less about it than you did before.
In essence, very few understand what RSS is and why it is something
of relevance to many of us. In such an eco-confused information
space, readers, information seekers and independent publishers are
somewhat confused about how to proceed, how much hype is in the
RSS news, and what is in store for them in this fast-changing communication
formula.
One way out of this confusion is to start adopting terms that would
allow popularization of the term and easier understanding of what
benefits it provides. The terms information and/or news-feed
appear in my opinion to be the ones best suited for this task.
What is RSS?
RSS
is an old technology that originated with Netscape. RSS allows readers
to sign-up and to receive news, headlines and short summaries from
websites, weblogs, and online newsletters. In order to do so, RSS
subscribers must download and install a so-called news reader or
aggregator (not to be confused with the more traditional type of
newsreaders used to access Usenet forums and discussions).
Newsreaders
and News aggregators - Where to find them
Many newsreaders
and aggregators exist today on the market. The most popular ones
are: Newzcrawler,
AmphetaDesk,
FeedDemon,
NetNewsWire,
NewsGator,
Newsmonster,
and Radio Userland.
For more resources, please see: Lockergnome
RSS Resources, RSS
Resources,
RSS Readers, or
RSS Info.
To simplify
your task of evaluating and better understanding RSS, I have summarized
the key positive aspects of RSS-based information feeds for email
publishing and distribution.
The Positive
Aspects of RSS-based newsfeeds
Using RSS as a source of timely and up-to-date information is a
positive evolution and a definite step forward from where we are
now. The advantages of RSS over traditional emails are:
1) RSS is timely. Subscribers get updates and breaking news
as soon as they are published and not on the date the newsletter
is due. RSS allows us to plug into selected sources of information,
like independent reporters, researchers and industry analysts and
when they disseminate or report some new information, it allows
us to be the first to get it, without having to subscribe to any
newsletter, or having to disclose our email address to a new, unknown
company.
2) RSS is cost-effective. Cost of delivery and distribution
is reduced dramatically. No more paying a mailing list distribution
provider, nor having to format and layout news and articles for
a different media than the website.
3) RSS is standards-compliant. (If wanted) Maximum compatibility
is preserved allowing email subscribers with text, HTML, AOL or
MIME Multipart preferences to all receive well formed news updates
perfectly compatible with your email client.
4) RSS is email independent. Email client not required. RSS
news and feeds can be easily read online, aggregated into a web
page journal/portal, sent out to SMS
clients or managed to create new online content.
5) RSS can be fully integrated fully in your email. Yes,
no one forbids the final user from using new services and tools
which do allow perfect integration and receipt of RSS feeds inside
your email Inbox (e.g., NewsGator,
BlogStreet
Info Aggregator).
6) RSS facilitates organization of content. Relevant messages
can be easily archived, sorted and organized according to topic,
in a fully automated way, something impossible with previously non-standard
newsletters.
7) The subscriber is again in full control. Subscription
and removal from a news feed is totally under the control of the
user, unlike now where users may receive many newsletters that make
it very hard or unintuitive to unsubscribe.
8) RSS is private. Privacy and security protection. RSS subscriber
never have to provide an email address to their selected information
provider. Publishers cannot as a consequence easily resell those
emails to unscrupulous marketers and email spammers. RSS is hardly
spammable as you always know the source of each news item received,
and there is no easy way yet to easily hack into the system.
9) RSS is fully resuable. RSS is a structured, re-usable
content protocol that allows the content to be reused for many other
purposes: feeding of other news channels and Web pages, integration
into dynamic libraries and learning objects.
10) RSS is searchable. RSS can be fully indexed and searched
just as Google does with the HTML content on the Internet. See Feedster
for a great live example.
11) RSS is secure. RSS cannot yet carry viruses or trojans
like a newsletter or email attachment can. If it did, you could
easily isolate and identify the source of your infection.
12) RSS is modifiable. Even after it has been sent out. Nobody
forbids your ability to change a current posting, or revise an errata,
and thus RSS subscribers indeed seamlessly receive that posted update.
As a matter of fact, RSS posts can be also removed or expired, and
while some would argue that this is not completely feasible, there
is certainly a wide open opportunity to explore further in this
direction.
13) RSS will be seamless to use. While not yet so, we are
getting closer and closer to having news readers and aggregators
fully integrated in email or so easy to use that it will not be
a problem anymore suggesting their adoption to novice and non-technical
users.
14) RSS feeds are not blocked by spam and email filters.
As newsletter publishers know very well, the battle to overcome
the spam barriers raised by spam and email filters is getting harder
everyday while RSS-based news feeds have no such problem.
15) RSS can be monetized. RSS can support free as well as
paid content distribution. Some publishers have already started
text ads into their RSS-delivered news feeds. The good news is that
if you don't like it, you can unsubscribe in a matter of seconds,
without having to ask anyone's permission.
16) RSS adds value. When RSS provides an easy to use complement
to your site, it clearly becomes a free value-added service. As
a matter of fact, this is already happening.
Lockergnome's RSS Resource and
Amazon.com Syndicated Content feeds are two great examples of
this.
17) RSS paves the road for true ethical marketing. As RSS
feeds provide a simple and effective way to for your customers and potential
clients. As RSS allows them to receive the specific kind of information
they seek, it is perceived as a tremendous bonus and as an opportunity
to simplify and reduce readers effort to reach, filter out and access
the type of information they are looking for. As a consequence,
there is no need for the publisher to utilize advertising to become
sustainable, as the publisher HAS all of the user attention and
need only to provide what the user is looking for.
RSS Cons:
RSS-based problems and possible limitations
1) RSS tools may be trojans for malicious software. Pre-assembled
aggregators and newsreaders that contain spyware and other malicious
code.
2) E-marketing through RSS. RSS marketing may soon be the
new trendy buzzword in e-marketing circles. If you come to think
of it, there is no embedded mechanism inside RSS that prevents me
from posting plain marketing and promotional news items and having
them sent out via RSS to anyone subscribing to my feed. While this
is not a problem per se, it may be possible that much of our present
day pure news feeds will soon be enriched with advertising and other
non-related items. The good news is that if and when that happens,
unsubscribing from any newsfeed will just be one click away from
you.
3) Limited formatting options. You can have images, yes,
but you certainly can't choose where they are going to be positioned
on the page. Forget also about having Verdana
12 point
in bold in one section, versus
Times New Roman
in another one.
4) RSS cannot be easily measured, tracked and accounted for.
For now, there are no simple or automated ways to account for how
many RSS subscribers you have to your own feeds, unless you set
up private access and you control it through a registration or subscription
mechanism.
5) RSS is hard to grasp. It has been difficult to popularize
as a "concept," as many people can hardly make any meaning
out of an acronym by itself. Once we find a good way to popularize
its role and function and identify a label to better refer to it,
we may also see a tremendous jump in rate of adoption. ("Newsfeed"
is already a good step in this direction.)
6) RSS requires us to adopt yet one more tool. Currently,
accessing RSS-based news feeds requires a separate software tool.
This may prevent novice and non-technical users from easily adopting
RSS as a format that they can fully leverage to stay updated on
their favorite sites.
7) RSS restrains editorial abilities. Publishers are limited
in the ways they can organize and prioritize the coverage of their
news content through this new medium. Their ability to showcase,
summarize, introduce or open up a newsletter is mostly unusable
when distributing news and info via RSS.
8) RSS leaves online publishers with no mailing list. Publishers
do not have a mailing list of those seeking information from them
and it becomes harder for them to introduce advertising and promotional
messages not strongly related with their focus as these will strongly
affect reader interest and willingness to keep reading/subscribing.
As subscribers to RSS-based information feeds do not need to share
their private emails with content publishers, they indirectly force
information publishers to maintain higher quality standards of publication
and to have a strong focus on their selected topics of interest.
On the other hand, publishers can still grow marketing lists by
offering selected "premium" channels only to subscribing
customers.
9) RSS offers no "reply" button. As of now, RSS
offers no way of replying or communicating directly to your information
source. It is likely that this limitation will soon be overcome
by complementary features, plugins and services filling in this
critical gap.
10) RSS is a bandwidth hog. Some criticize the fact that
RSS readers and news aggregators have to visit a news address frequently
to check for updates and new posts. The critics argue that this
utilizes an enormous amount of bandwidth uselessly as supposedly
newsreaders and aggregators would attempt to pool info from those
sites several times a day. (If you look at the issue from a different
point of view, you can see how a much larger bandwidth is actually
used when Internet users seek information by surfing to unknown
sites and online resources which, rich in images and other bandwidth
hogs such as Javascript, tables and visual ads, require much more
bandwidth to display than any RSS information feed I have seen so
far.)
11) RSS comes in many flavours. Recently RSS has seen a number
of different versions of its specification appear, and therefore
it should come as no surprise to see listings indicating support
for RSS 0.9, 1.x, 2.x. There is indeed a set of different possible
implementations of RSS with differing qualities and capabilities.
Suffice it to say for now that most news readers and aggregators
read all of these different formats, making the issue not critical
for end users. It is rather on the part of both content publishers
and subscribers to activate and engage themselves in understanding
which of possible standards may best benefit their specific needs
and requirements.
Conclusion
In the wake of the quickly spreading rumour, Email
is Dead, long live RSS, the superficial, non-technical reader
lost early reference to the fact that what is being really touted
is the death of e-mail publishing such as newsletter distribution
and mail discussion lists. It is these type of email communications
that according to these authors would be soon succumbing to an RSS
flavoured distribution medium, and not the whole email-based exchange
universe.
So we are in effect not talking at all about the possible death
of email as we now know it (though a good review of it - how we
use it and misuse it - is way overdue) but about the raise of RSS-based
news feeds as an effective and efficient distribution medium for
news, newsletter type content and other selected and highly focused
types of information. Jon Udell writes to support the need for a
more reliable email system: "Of the various proposals floating
around, the -- a DNS-based solution that enables a receiving mail
server to verify whether the sender's IP address is authorized to
send from the domain within the sender's address -- seems particularly
interesting."
Electronic inter-personal and business exchanges will still largely
utilize traditional email, although for the vast majority, this
is becoming harder and harder to manage in an effective way.
Email
is Dead -- Long Live RSS: With mailboxes overflowing with
junk mail, users have stopped reading email or have imposed spam
blockers, which often block legitimate mail as well as junk. According
to a survey by
ReturnPath, an email list hygiene company, "17% of permission-based
e-mail -- mail that users previously said they would like to receive
-- was incorrectly blocked by the top 12 Internet service providers
during the first half of 2003."
I have been able to verify that unless specific precautions are
taken in the distribution of an email newsletter, over 50% of them
may bounce off spam filters, be deleted or never reach the final
user. And that is a lot of valuable resources put to waste. When
I see that over 3,000 of my newsletter copies are not reaching my
own long standing subscribers, I can certainly empathize with RSS
promoters and can fully see the advantages and benefits I and some
of my readers would get out of leveraging RSS to its fullest.
Three points to avoid RSS confusion syndrome
a) Newsreaders and aggregators
A news aggregator is a dedicated software program capable of contacting
and gathering pre-selected news items posted at specific addresses
on the Internet. What the news aggregator does is simply to go out
to the URL/addresses you have specified, collect the information
stored inside an auto-generating file that sits invisibly next to
certain Web pages (and which contains all of the most recent updates
to that page) and bring that information back inside the newsreader/aggregator
while storing that information in a specific folder you have specified.
So, as long as you know how to write the syntax and grammar of that
invisible RSS/RDF/XML file(s) that sits idle on your server, you
are in full control of what subscribers to your RSS feed will see/read.
Since few people enjoy creating an RSS feed by hand, new publishing
tools have been developed to facilitate this task.
b) Will RSS replace email even for personal communications?
Most people interested in finding out more about RSS and its future
have been wondering how RSS could ever supplant altogether email
and how we would then go about sending a message to a friend, work
colleague, customer or business prospect in such RSS-enabled future.
Though I may raise a ton of suspicious eyebrows with this affirmation
I am prone to believe that solid and certified individual authentication
maybe the only solid answer to this digital communication problem
deriving from the fact that people can act with absolute anonymity.
Take away the anonymity from the education and the problem is easily
solved. While this does not mean that I must surrender my complete
ability to stay anonymous online, it establishes the option for
those needing to carry out serious business online to do so by allowing
themselves to be authenticated and certified for who they really
are. Then we need not worry anymore about SPAM.
The level of authentication required in this vision would allow
anyone who wished to obtain a personal identity token by utilizing
a combination of digital authentication technologies (fingerprinting,
voice, iris-scan, etc.) complemented by the intervention of a trusted
and certified human notary who would have to take under his responsibility
and good name that the person being authenticated is actually the
one he or she declares to be. Once a solid authentication mechanism
is in place the road to block everything not coming from trusted
or "known" sources becomes extremely easy to implement.
Now imagine having an RSS feed address that is not available publicly.
You could have such an RSS feed reserved, for example, for all of
the information you need to pass onto your team. If you assume that
email was not there, it would be apparent to you that you could
indeed post all of the information relating to team work and assignments
on a non-public page on your site, generate an RSS channel and send
the URL/address channel to all of the people in your team. You can
easily see that once they have set-up their news aggregator to read
that special address you have provided, they all have a way to receive
all of the information you want them to receive without having to
use traditional email.
c) Potential for independent publishers to offer Premium content
information-feeds
If you have been wondering how to obtain the maximum gain from RSS
feeds while being able to maintain a growing list of subscribers
my suggestion is to consider creating "private," premium,
fee-based RSS feeds to your preferred paying customers.
Simply offer a subscription box that collects for you the names
and emails of those who want to benefit from this free service.
Then send them a small newsreader preconfigured to read the RSS
feeds your customer has requested. (Send out in exchange for a reader
email both an effective newsreader and a list of RSS feeds to receive
automatically as soon as the tool is setup.) In this fashion, you
get to keep your growing mailing list, which remains of critical
importance to build business and marketing opportunities, while
simplifying the subscribers job of having to download a newsreader,
having to set it up and having to configure it to receive your feeds.
A bit too much indeed to ask from your patient and often non-technical
readers).
Overall, RSS is the best method available today to receive news
updates, site changes and information feeds from your selected sources
while avoiding the usual amount of search, navigation and ancillary
interruption advertising required to receive most valuable content
online.
References
Email
is Dead -- Long Live RSS
The End of E-Mail?, September 1, 2003
Is
RSS the Answer to the Spam Crisis? by Ryan Naraine
RSS
Feeds are the Better Email Newsletters
Is
RSS Email's Savior - Or Just Overhyped?
RSS
replacing email? email dead?
RSS
and email(ing lists) links and references
RSS
definition
Short for RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary, an XML format for
syndicating Web content. A Web site that wants to allow other sites
to publish some of its content creates an RSS document and registers
the document with an RSS publisher. A user that can read RSS-distributed
content can use the content on a different site. Syndicated content
includes such data as news feeds, events listings, news stories,
headlines, project updates, excerpts from discussion forums or even
corporate information.
