There are many communications tools that have changed my news and information life in the early 21st Century, but none more than RSS and my trusty RSS reader. I use a reliable piece of desktop software called “Feedreader,” because I like desktop readers, as opposed to Web or cloud-based readers (at least for now — mobile may change that), and it has been such a reliable old friend.

Every other week, it seems, there’s some self-serving link-baiter hollering that RSS is dead, to which I simply shake my head in utter amazement. It’s not just that the whole unbundled Web world works on RSS, it’s that the path one must take in order to get to that belief is so utterly gutted with potholes of lies and absurdities, that to actually arrive at that conclusion, one’s intelligence has been completely dislodged by all the bumping and shuddering of the ride. Plainly speaking, it’s sloppy thinking to even remotely take such a stand. RSS dead? Holy crap, no; it’s just getting started.

As if it’s the sole determiner of the “right” path, people always ask me, “Where’s the money?” Unbundled ads — RSS items that begin with a page of content (think SEO value) and are sent into the website’s stream — haven’t been introduced yet (they will), but a lunch with old friend Mike Orren led me to the RSS feed of John Gruber. Gruber sells a weekly sponsorship of his RSS feed for $5,500 (that’s $286k, if sold out). Gruber’s Daring Fireball website has a highly unique, desirable, and large audience of ubergeeks, but the point is that he values his RSS feed enough to price it accordingly and pay his bills. Here’s the value proposition, as presented by Gruber:

Week-long sponsorships are available for Daring Fireball’s syndicated feed (RSS). This is the only way to promote your product or service specifically to Daring Fireball’s audience of Mac nerds, designers, nitpickers, perfectionists, and connoisseurs of fine sarcasm.

• Estimated Daring Fireball feed subscribers: Over 400,000.
• Estimated monthly web page views: 3 million.
• Sponsorship is exclusive. Only one sponsor per week.
• A promotional item from the sponsor will appear in the feed at the start of the week.
• At some point during the week, I’ll also post a Linked List item thanking the feed sponsor.

That’s right, he actually posts a “promotional item” in the feed. News organizations tremble at the thought, but let’s be real. Firstly, Gruber doesn’t accept sponsorships from products he doesn’t or wouldn’t use, and the audience reads each and every one of them. Why? Because they trust Gruber’s opinion. Here’s what it looks like in my RSS reader.

Geeks understand the value of RSS where media companies don’t, because they come at the Web from two different perspectives. The tech crowd views RSS as an efficient way to spread knowledge and information, whereas media companies view RSS only as a way to tease people and bring them back to their home base. Consequently, RSS is an afterthought to media companies, and that’s one of the big reasons why the process hasn’t really reached the masses.

There’s one major reason that media companies don’t play well with RSS: it’s a pull technology, while media is a world of push. With RSS, the user is the one making all the decisions. This is chaos to those used to control, which is why the concept is counterintuitive to mass media. This is an inertia barrier that we simply must get past, because RSS will take us forward into the world of unbundled media. while refusing simply holds us back.

Where do we begin? At the top of our organizations, all managers and leaders must use RSS. Take the couple of hours it’ll take to set up an RSS reader on your laptop, because the only way to know what’s going on in this world is to participate. Like me, I’ll wager that it changes your news consumption habits forever.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2011 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media, RSS, Unbundled Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.