Just when you thought you knew RSS…
Here’s a great quote from the inimitable Doc Searls:
I’ve generally stopped adding blogs to my RSS reader. As I said today my aggregator is mostly filled with searches for keywords and keyword combinations.
But my point is, I got myself a topic, and took a whopping… lessee… five minutes to research and write the whole thing up. This entire post took half an hour, but that’s counting the time I spent caring about the other subject searches (above) for nonblog (mostly work-related) reasons.In other words, the blog is an avocational steam valve on the side of my vocational work.
A confession. When aggregators first came out, I took a tiny bit of an interest in them; but didn’t develop a dependency on them until subject search feeds came along. Now I don’t know how I got along without them.
Without even noticing it, I have evolved as an RSS user and in so doing have made it even more difficult for any media outlet to “broadcast” to me. Think about it. Most of the ideas about RSS advertising are to advertise within a certain feed. But what happens when people no longer subscribe to that feed? When the only way they can get to you is via a search feed that matches their interest? Ah, the plot thickens.
This, again, is why people who cling to mass media concepts are hiding their heads in the sand.
