The Two Faces of Subscribing
Okay, a couple posts ago I tried to explain RSS to you fellow newbies out there. The honeymoon between me and RSS is not over, so bear with me.
RSS reinvents the subscription model of the web. Most people, desiring more and current information from their favorite websites, hand over their email addresses to these sites in order to receive updates via email. This works moderately well, and we’ve been doing it here on mindmined.com since July of 1999. And as long as email remains a good avenue for this, we will continue to offer email subscriptions.
But email, for many, is sacred space. Many prefer to manage personal or business affairs through email and to receive nothing but directly interpersonal messages in there. Others may not be so strict about it, but nonetheless find themselves in the “mood” to interact with news-type content more often when surfing the web, not attending to email.
With RSS feeds, you can receive updates from your favorite websites outside of your email. Instead of giving the website your email address, give your news reader program a link to the XML feed from that website. Do you see what happened there? The RSS way, you didn’t have to tell anyone who you were.
Privacy is not the goal however. That’s just a perk. For me, time I spent websurfing is now spent more often in my RSS news reader… and less time. This morning I reviewed feeds from National Public Radio, Wired and Slashdot, in under 15 minutes, when I might have spent 45 minutes or more waiting for pages (and often, ads) to load for the self-same content on their respective websites.
Granted, sometimes the feeds are mere teasers, and you need to click into the website if you are interested in reading more. But that is a crucial “if” when it comes to your valuable time. If you are not interested in the post, delete it in the news reader as if it were an email.
So there’s another plug for RSS. Try it. And Blackberry users (some of my friends from Liberty Mutual were wielding RIMs yesterday at the Asia restaurant) should check out Newsberry. I am sure it rocketh socks just like my SharpReader for Windows. Onward!