RSS for the Masses
A nice post here on trying to figure out the right way to make syndication more broadly appealing. One thing that is discussed is the use of a style sheet associated with the XML document so that if a user clicks on a feed link in a browser, they at least get something legible instead of a bunch of angle brackets.
That's what we're doing with the "Browser Friendly" service in FeedBurner -- that uses a CSS style sheet, although we could get even more sophisticated if we moved to an XSLT style sheet. All that is well and good, but is it enough to drive adoption? We're thinking of some other ways to make push syndication almost down to the protocol level to make the whole experience better for both publishers and subscribers, but I like seeing discussions (well, no comments on this item, so I guess it's not much of a discussion unfortunately) on this topic.
Comments
Okay, I'll comment. I've been tinkering with blogs for a while (nothing public yet), reading about RSS for ages, and may turn on a feed or three this Spring. So I'm explaining this to my girlfriend, and telling her about feedburner. She's a CMU HCI grad, for cack's sake, and doesn't really get it. Not because of any weakness on her part, but because it's newish and unprecedented.
You know how Spyonit was a sort of easy-to-get front for a much deeper and more capable architecture? Seems like syndication needs one or nine or a hundred of those. I want to say, "Hey love, I made you a web page. It tells you about all the cool art openings and bands in Pittsburgh, and it updates itself all by its own self. Oh also it has CMU events." "How did you DO that?" "Well, there's something called RSS...."
But there aren't the right feeds yet, for that example. And even if there were, I'm not yet aware of the tool that would make it *easy* for me to build that little page of subscriptions. Guess I could tweak her Yahoo page.
Okay. So YOUR audience is so far mostly publishers. And... uh oh. I just sat here for five minutes thinking, and I can't finish this paragraph. I have no answers. I got the cows to the gate, but I can't make them go in. I guess this is the long way of saying I think you're asking the right question. Feedburner has a huge stake in feeding this market, building awareness, increasing desire and accessibility. How?
Now I'll be stewing on this question for days. Hope you don't mind that I thought out loud onto your blog.
Posted by: Marc | April 15, 2004 09:50 AM