Five years ago, I wrote a post about How to Fix RSS (which was my first post to appear at the top of Techmeme). The technology and media landscape has dramatically changed since then, so I’ve updated the simple three-step program, with a particular focus on news organizations.
RSS is NOT dead… it just needs to [...]

On the eve of The Guardian’s launch of full text RSS feeds, Matt McAlister, Head of Guardian Developer Network, pinged me looking for examples of other mainstream media companies that have full text RSS feeds. Surely this many years into the age of syndication, Guardian couldn’t be the first mainstream media company to adopt full [...]

Despite the challenges with consumer adoption of RSS, XML feeds have become the building blocks of online publishing. So Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, the show-stealing feed management platform, for $100 million comes as no surprise. The immediate applications are obvious — enhanced feed-based search, integration of feed stats into Google Analytics, integration of feed ad [...]

The irony of the video RSS in Plain English is that it is simultaneously one of the clearest and most engaging explanations of RSS I have ever seen and also a vivid demonstration of why RSS has not gone mainstream — how can something that takes 3.5 minutes to explain be a killer app?

There are many interesting similarities between widgets and RSS:

Fantastically flexible distributed technology
A boon for information junkies and power users
Difficult to explain to a non-geek
Name is complete opaque to average, mainstream users
Difficult for average, mainstream users to understand why it’s so cool
Huge technical savviness barrier for average, mainstream user adoption

Erick Schonfeld has an interview with Netvibes [...]

Newsweek has launched a web-based RSS reader, i.e. My Newsweek — looks like a reasonably smart move on the face of it. But using the reader requires Joe Newsweek to grok terms like “feed,” “content,” and, “RSS” — which looks less smart.
The real problem with Newsweek’s RSS reader (a private-label version of Newsgator) is that [...]

I’ve discussed the problem of geek control of Web 2.0, along with many others including Umair Haque, Pete Cashmore, David Beisel, and Fraser Kelton. (Hit tip to Pete for pulling together the threads.)
This new Geeks for Non-Geeks movement got me thinking about the evolving definition of a “geek.” The following is just a first draft, [...]

There are two prevailing views of the evolution of online information flow — one focuses on the arc of technology, the other on what the user wants and needs. The technology-centric view focuses on issues like RSS adoption rates and RSS vs. email. The user-centric view focuses on issues like how people can find the [...]

RSS is in Internet Explorer 7!!! The blogosphere is shouting from the rooftops. Yawn. I tried RSS in IE7, and it highlights the true shortcoming of current RSS applications — it’s really not much of an improvement over “favorites” or “bookmarks.”
IE7 goes so far as to put the RSS reader in same menu as favorites [...]

RSS sucks. I’m with Paul Kedrosky. Let the technodweebospehere rain fire and brimstone. I could add to Paul’s rant, but instead here’s a Really Simple three-step Solution (of course, the real first step is admitting that you have a problem):
1. Call it “subscribing”
Everyone understands subscribing. You’ve got your email newsletter subscriptions, your premium cable channel [...]

There is so much wrong with the blogger view that the monoliths of old media will be brought down and consumers will bask in the glory of infinite media choice — discussing, creating, tagging, rating (meta-ing) each other’s content in one big solipsistic frenzy. Everyone can create media. Everyone controls their own media. Everyone is [...]

Pheedo, the RSS advertising shop, released an analysis of client data that showed readers of RSS feeds are nearly 10 times as likely to click on an ad sent as a standalone feed post than an ad in embedded in the content of the post.
Consumers using RSS readers are more likely to click on [...]