Last week Dan York blogged about a topic that hits home with those of us who love RSS: Staying informed online without visiting the actual websites that publish the information we’re consuming:
I don’t go to friends’ websites. (Sorry!) I don’t go to my employer’s website. I don’t go to any organization’s websites. I don’t go to my city’s website. Every once in a while I might hit CNN’s web page or a weather site, but that’s about it.
But one of the things Dan does do is load up on RSS feeds, so that updates from sites come to him, through his reader, once they’ve been published. Thanks to RSS, Dan doesn’t have to:
RSS = efficiency
Consuming more information in less time is why I use RSS, too. In one place — Google Reader, in my case — I can read blogs and mainstream media stories, watch videos, check out my friends’ photos, find out who’s talking about me online, keep track of price updates for flights I’d like to take, catch the latest local weather forecast, and share my favorite posts with my online network — all without ever visiting any of the original websites that published that media. Pretty damn efficient if you ask me.
How do you use your RSS reader?
Anything I’ve missed? How else do make RSS work for you?
4 Responses
Tiffany Monhollon
17|Jan|2008 1I think I need a new reader, because Bloglines seems to be getting slower and slower every day. Perhaps that’s because I use it to store a lot of posts I want to revisit. I’ve been trying out stumbling as a better way to keep track of things I like, so perhaps that will help out a bit.
It’s interesting, because as useful as RSS is to a user, it presents a bit of an issue for the owner, who’s losing a valuable metric if people stop clicking over to sites, and perhaps a valuable revenue stream as well.
Bryan
18|Jan|2008 2Tiffany, thank you for your comment. I used to be a Bloglines user, but switched to Google Reader last summer and haven’t looked back! The ability to easily share and tag posts is excellent, as are the shortcut keys for powering through unread feeds.
You’re quite right that RSS presents a challenge for site owners, particularly for those who sell ad space based on eyeballs. I nearly made a note about that very point in this post. What many companies do — and what I hope you won’t do — is set their RSS feeds to only show part of the message. The reader then has to click through to the original site to see the rest of the post.
And as for you? Maybe you need to consider other metrics for measuring success. You’re using Feedburner for your feeds, so what about keeping track of how many people are subscribing. Is that number growing? And if you insist on advertising, Feedburner should give you the option to insert small ads into the feed itself. Options to consider, right?
27 Secrets to Linking Like a Master Networker at Personal PR
05|Feb|2008 3[...] with links. People aren’t going to stay on your blog forever anyway. And they might not even be reading it from your site, so don’t worry about [...]
Vanina
11|Feb|2008 4I also use RSS a lot. Once I find a blog interesting it goes on my Netvibes page. When I review my feeds and that I find an interesting article to read I however then go on the site because I find it more convivial:)
Search
Finding me elsewhere
Bryan Person's profile
Subscribe by e-mail
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Archives
Categories
Creative Commons license
This work by Bryan Person is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.