Sean’s Rant

Media used to be “what they wanted you to watch”. With RSS the user now has the power and access of someone who goes to a library or bookstore and sees the “LOUD!” exhibit, which the user can glance at and drill down deeper into if he wants to. It doesn’t stop there anymore. Its not just picking which billboard anymore. Now its deciphering which section and book you are interested in, on a continuous basis. I pick RSS feeds, and if I don’t like them they get dropped like a book that wasn’t that interesting. If I like what an RSS feed has to say I start to get more immersed, and get committed. RSS is the ultimate F YOU to the mainstream media.

Now the problem is the massive amount of the information available and the dissemination of all of it. One way to do this is to use sign posts. See what other people are recommending. Another way is to be the pioneer. If we wait around for sign posts we might not see new terrain for a while, but we’ll be assured that it is “good” terrain. If we are the pioneer, we might trudge though some muck, but sometimes we can find the nuggets we are looking for, kind of like Alltop talks about as their main model. They sort out, by key word, the top “nuggets” on the internet. This is another type of signpost. So is Digg upcoming posts.

I am running out of RSS feed reads lately so I’ll have to go searching, but the posts I am seeing lately are good stuff. I think RSS is KING because with a quick scan I can see what I want to drill down on and learn more about. Most of the time to get a gist of an article, all one has to do is read the feed, so by reading 50 feed headlines, you have a gist of what is available in your reader inbox, and what is going on in your chosen media.

Catering to the RSS is going to be very advantageous to the next generation business model. Like I have said before, if your RSS feed sucks, unless your stuff is so good that its worth clicking through, or visiting your site, I won’t be going there.

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4. CNN Comment on RSS feeds