RSS — why grandma doesn't matter

What technology your grandmother understands is irrelevant to your web content strategy. In particular, you should ignore grandma's opinion about RSS. What you should pay attention to is this:

• Yahoo News, gmail, My Yahoo, and MSN allow users to subscribe to (RSS) news sources on their home pages. Users can subscribe to any source including yours, if you produce RSS. Don't you want your customers to at least have the opportunity to subscribe directly to your content on their home/news page? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
• The list of mainstream sites allowing you to subscribe to RSS is growing, not shrinking. Yahoo News and gmail just added this feature in the last 24 hours. Even main stream media sites such as the LA Times are making private label RSS readers available. The Wall Street Journal's RSS-powered online edition now outperforms the print edition. Don't you want your content to participate in this growing trend?
• Worried that, like grandma, you don't understand how to produce or publish RSS? You don't have to, just start a blog. They all produce RSS automatically, are quick to set up, and can be very low cost. Don't want to invest the time to blog? Use a free service like feedburner or Sally Falkow's $89/month PRESSfeed.

So, in a nutshell, the argument for RSS is this: (1) There's an expanding user base that is becoming significant because of main stream media involvement; (2) Neither you nor this user base need to understand any of RSS's technical niceties to subscribe to or provide relevant content. Rok Hrastnik and Chris Pirillo take heart.

Tagback: RSS.