I found this press release which takes to task RSS feeds to be interesting. Here is the gist:
Nielsen Norman Group researchers found that people today are extremely fast-paced when processing their inbox and reading newsletters. The average time allocated to a newsletter after opening it is just 51 seconds. The predominant behavior is to scan the text, with only 19% of newsletters being read fully. Eyetracking observations of users reading RSS news feeds showed that people scan the headlines and blurbs in feeds even more ruthlessly than they scan newsletters.
“When your message appears in somebody’s RSS newsreader, it has a diminutive footprint that’s rubbing shoulders with a flood of headlines from other sites,” said Jakob Nielsen, co-founder and principal of Nielsen Norman Group, “Newsletters are a much more powerful medium than RSS feeds, and I would not be surprised if it turns out that companies make 10 times as much money from each newsletter subscriber.”
Of course the impact of the study is more or less questionable when you actually get a quote in the press release that indicates this is a lot of guessing. to wit: “I would not be surprised…that companies make ten times as much money..” What does that mean? How about saying, “I would not be surprised if companies lost their asses in this deal anyway!” It’s just as valid. How about this for an idea. Actually study it and report back. Geez.
Meanwhile, the fact is that RSS is a new phenomenon and few people know how to use it and fewer still use it effectively.
Yea, if you know how to use RSS feeds, they really come in handy. When i open up thunderbird, it’s good to have all of the news i feel like opening right there infront of me.
I used to do a an in-house newletter that needed to be read globally.
I would have LOVED to have had something like RSS.
The problem with these kinds of newsletters is that the CEO and other high level staff assume that the employees are interested in them personally… thus too many stories about the CEO’s grandchildren or the latest book they are reading.
An in-house newsletter should primarily be about hard news that employees need to know.
Don’t have an RSS, don’t really know that much about them, does that make me retarded?
I do have a page at Yahoo where the news I want to read is organised the way I want to read it, is this something like an RSS?
Hell if I know.
Old media is running scared.
John W,
Yes, that’s RSS on Yahoo. They’ve totally converted over and I think is is great. Yahoo does RSS the best I’ve seen.
Probably you are just using the package modules Yahoo gives you but you can add any of the zillion RSS feeds on the web. It’s how I follow this blog.
(I’m a huge fan, obviously. )
RSS isn’t just about media.
It can also be used in social networking, especially when combined with blogs. For instance, you can set up a private blog for your family and make all family members co-hosts. People add news as things happen in their lives. (even from a cell phone or email)
Then you link this RSS to your Yahoo home page and you can easily keep track of what’s happening with people without creating a flood of email that has to fight it’s way through spam.
What I don’t understand is why more groups like churches, PTAs, clubs, businesses, etc don’t use RSS more. It seems like an easy and streamlined way to do newsletter.
I’ve been a media professional for a long time now and I don’t get excited about much but I think RSS is really great.