At the Syndicate conference in New York last week, I felt a sort of time warp back to the events in early dotcom glory days where the thought leaders of the time proclaimed the Web a liberating force from traditional advertising models. We were told people could reclaim control of their media consumption from the media powerhouses. And though I wasn't in the business world when cable empowered CNN and MTV to take share from the incumbents, I'm betting many of the same dynamics were driven home by the forward-thinking media types at the conferences of the day.
Among the many views shared at Syndicate:
Adoption
RSS adoption has hit critical mass. I don't know what the metric was when that happened, but it's done. If you don't support RSS usage, you're not in the game...Can you imagine operating a company today that had no Web site? Will the same thing happen with RSS?
Standards
We've all joined onto a platform, a common standard for pushing/pulling/sharing individual items. Those items might be news headlines, transaction data, persistent search queries, links to downloads, etc. And because we have a standard, we can universally identify what those things are and how to treat them...just like what HTTP and HTML once did for the World Wide Web.
Integration
RSS is basically invisible to the originator and consumer of a feed. The blog tools all publish RSS automatically, and most CMS's have been configured to publish RSS feeds. It's much like when we began publishing HTML templates over databases instead of building volumes of individual HTML pages. The technology is becoming invisibile behind the utility of it.
Proliferation
If you don't interact the way your customers want you to, they simply stop communicating with you. There is so much information to choose from out there that you have to produce quality stuff, or at least stuff that is unique. Google was born from the need to find web pages that mattered. Who is going to help us identify the media companies that communicate well in this new world.
RSS adoption has hit critical mass. I don't know what the metric was when that happened, but it's done. If you don't support RSS usage, you're not in the game...Can you imagine operating a company today that had no Web site? Will the same thing happen with RSS?
Standards
We've all joined onto a platform, a common standard for pushing/pulling/sharing individual items. Those items might be news headlines, transaction data, persistent search queries, links to downloads, etc. And because we have a standard, we can universally identify what those things are and how to treat them...just like what HTTP and HTML once did for the World Wide Web.
Integration
RSS is basically invisible to the originator and consumer of a feed. The blog tools all publish RSS automatically, and most CMS's have been configured to publish RSS feeds. It's much like when we began publishing HTML templates over databases instead of building volumes of individual HTML pages. The technology is becoming invisibile behind the utility of it.
Proliferation
If you don't interact the way your customers want you to, they simply stop communicating with you. There is so much information to choose from out there that you have to produce quality stuff, or at least stuff that is unique. Google was born from the need to find web pages that mattered. Who is going to help us identify the media companies that communicate well in this new world.
I'm certain these arguments were among some of the same arguments used to declare the end of print publishing as we knew it back in 1998. A paranoid would begin finding ways to make sure his or her business is able to protect his or her assets. Many people did just that during the boom, and many of those people are still in business or are even flourishing since the crash. An opportunist would start looking for ways to let customers define how his or her business can help them better. Many of those who played aggressively during the boom with risky models focused on adding value for their customers have created huge barriers to entry for old media.
Doc Searls suggested in his keynote at Syndicate that we consider our investments in RSS purely an expense. Many of us have dropped ads into our feeds trying to balance the equation a little, but he recommended we break free of the restraints in our thinking first and then find ways to make money. I can't see myself doing that without exacerbating an already paranoid mind, but just the fact that he recommended it shows how early we are in the RSS game.
Given the fact that the new Internet generation is entering universities around the world now with much higher online usage habits and expectations of what online media should do, we may have no choice but to use the money we're earning from traditional Web sites to fund advances in RSS. Sound familiar?
Actually, I see them as an investment in relationship-building, not just an expense. Feeds are becoming a commonplace tool for keeping publishers connected with their readers. They're the new subscription mechanism, largely a more efficient replacement for e-mail alerts or newsletters in that sense. Since business is all about relationships, building and strengthening connections with audiences is definitely worth some investment.
IMHO, of course
- Amy Gahran
Editor, CONTENTIOUS
http://blog.contentious.com