RSS Feeds -- Summary
August 31, 2004 | 
9 Comments
Summary: A summary of the responses to my post asking for opinions on RSS feeds.
Yesterday, I asked my readers to help me understand how they used RSS feeds, news-readers and all that goes along with them. If you’ve not, you’ll want to give the original post and its subsequent comments a read.
There’s a lot of good information there about how people view and use news-feeds. It isn’t too enlightening, but it validates some of the decisions I’ve made in regards to the feeds I offer and gives me a pretty damn good baseline of reader (user) data from which to base any future decisions in regards to feeds.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond. I really appreciate it. I’m simply amazed at the depth of responses there and it goes to prove that by letting your users/readers/visitors offer feedback and be a part of what you’re doing you can really help ensure you make the right decisions and create a better experience for everyone.
RSS is changing everything in regards to Web content
The first thing that became obvious is that there is no doubt that RSS and related technologies have significantly changed the way many of us use the Web. Web content will never be the same, and I imagine as these technologies mature, the future of Web content will change even more strikingly.
I’m by no means and expert on syndication, nor am I an early adopter like many are, but news-feeds have made access to content on the Web much easier for me and have really changed how I get information, not only on the Web, but in general.
And I’m not even taking anywhere near the advantage of this stuff that many of you are.
RSS Feed Observations
In an effort to curtail my already longwinded recap, I’m going to present a list of general observations I was able to pull from the responses I’ve got so far. I’ve got 76—I think that’s plenty to make some basic assumptions. If you want the full story, just go and read the full responses.
- Offering a choice in RSS feeds is key. Most of my readers liked to read my content via the browser and preferred to subscribe to summaries, but there were enough who liked the full text feeds to warrant keeping them. As well, if people are clicking through to my Web site, it doesn’t really hurt me to offer the full text option.
- Regardless of what type of feed is subscribed to, a good title and summary is important.
- Quite a few people used some combination of feeds and notification services. Making sure you ping these services, in addition to offering feeds, is important.
- For my audience at least, the Web site itself is very important. It helps make the content what it is and without the design and the site, the content would suffer in many folks’ eyes.
- Web-based feed-readers are very popular. Bloglines seems to be the preferred way, over all, to access feeds. I’ll be checking that out soon and in fact I made some adjustments to my feeds and site to help users of these kinds of services.
- Ads in feeds would bother quite a few people, but probably not enough to rule them out. The key here is they’d need to be done right, just like browser-delivered ads. And, no, I don’t plan to add them anytime soon (if ever), I was just curious.
What I’ve learned so far
Aside from what I mentioned above, it seems pretty obvious that syndication is very important to the success of a content-based Web site. I expect that as these technologies make their way from the geeks to the regular folks, this will become more and more true.
However, they’ve not (yet, anyway) changed the way content is published on the Web enough to warrant neglecting your content-driven Web site. It’s hard to say, given my audience, but it seems that things like design, static (as in not-delivered-by-a-feed) content and content presentation are very important to many readers.
While I recognize that things can change quickly, I think good ‘ol Web site (and Web browser) will be here for awhile. Syndication is just another (frankly very easy) way to help your readers access, find and be notified about your content.
Thanks to everyone who’s helping me make sure I use it in a user-centered way that’s good for everyone.
Filed under: Web General
Comments
1. Jeff Minard said:
Also, Feed On Feeds is fun.
Ads would be cool on full text rss feeds, but not summaries
Other than all of that, good sh*t ;-)
Posted on August 31, 2004 11:56 PM | #
2. ssp said:
To be unabashedly frank �€“ I think your conclusions aren’t worth much. The ‘to my audience’ restriction should be there all over it. I’d guess that your audience will be interested in the whole web thing from the creating side in one way or another. I.e. they are not the average web consumer.
How many people know about RSS and its cousins? My guess would be a single digit percentage. A low one.
Feeds are great for (surprise!) syndication and other forms of automated processing. Using feeds, tools like Feedster can process your content much more effectively than others that need heuristics to separate content from all the other stuff on the page. For that alone it’s worth having full content feeds.
As for the choice of feeds - at least a choice of different formats is just silly and will put people off even more. You wouldn’t ask people whether they’d prefer your page in HTML or XHTML either, would you? Those kinds of questions deserve nothing but a resounding ‘don’t care’ as an answer. A choice for different levels of content is of course a completely different thing.
Posted on September 1, 2004 12:07 AM | #
3. Small Paul said:
No idea about feeds, as I don’t yet use or produce any, but I want to heartily agree with your comment about the usefulness of user feedback. The web is a great communication medium, as it removes lots and lots of the friction of getting your views across. A user just types their thoughts and clicks, and there it is. User feedback is like gold dust to pretty much any endeavour, business or otherwise - it lets you know how pleased people are with you, and exactly how you can please them more.
I now get really, really annoyed when any content-based site tries to get me to register in order to comment. Too much time and effort. Why you’d want to say no to feedback from lazy users is beyond me. Make it easy, people.
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:10 AM | #
4. Dave P said:
I don’t know if this is really valid. I can only speak for myself, but I put up with ads on websites because I consider the site to be the “property” of the web site owner, and give them that right.
I consider what comes into my feed reader as my “property”, similar to email. And as much as a ads in email/spam are considered satan’s work, so to would ads coming through my reader.
I wonder if anyone else out there makes this distinction? If so I think it would really alter your original statement of viability of ads in the medium.
Posted on September 1, 2004 08:32 AM | #
5. Keith said:
ssp – Fair enough. And I think I said there wasn’t anything too enlighening in there.
Having said that, those responses give me lots of data from which to learn about my readers. The questions were for *me* and *my audience*. In that way they were very valid, as well I do think they hold a bit more in the way of gereral attitudes to RSS than you give credit to.
I do agree with you about the choice of format. I just offer an Atom feed because it was requested. Until there is a standard format, aren’t we a bit stuck in the middle here?
When I was talking choice I meant in what the feed contained. As in a feed for a group of categories.
Dave P – I think I get you, but I disagree. The feed is not your property, it’s the writer’s. If you are reading my content, that I wrote, and I contain an ad within that, isn’t that my choice? After all, you don’t have to subscribe to my content and my feed. Right?
Does that make sense? Not trying to totally disagree, just give light to what I think make more sense to me. But then again, your view is valid too I guess. I just don’t agree with it. ;)
Posted on September 1, 2004 10:05 AM | #
6. Kyle said:
Keith, I found the comments yesterday and the resulting recap pretty helpful. As someone who is pretty new to the whole RSS thing, this is a good summary and introduction to how people use this stuff. I do realize tha it is somewot centered around your particular case with Asterisk, but with that many responses it can’t help but cover some basic bases…thx again.
Posted on September 1, 2004 10:58 AM | #
7. Dave P said:
Keith: I don’t think I was as clear as I’d like to be with my comment.
Actually, semantically you’re 100% correct, and I agree with you, but what I was trying to do was highlight perception as a user.
The difference being that I reach out and “travel to” a website, wheras feeds “come to me” in most respects. It’s because of this that the perception I highlighted is (in my mind - I’d like others to back me up if they agree, otherwise my argument is moot) formed by a user.
Quite correct. But arguably this hurts you as a content producer more than me as a user.
Whether the perception is valid or “correct” is really irrelevant, as the only thing that matters is the amount of your audience that feel the same.
Posted on September 1, 2004 11:01 AM | #
8. Keith said:
Dave P – Sure, but I have to say it’s not all about the user. I have my own goals as well. For the most part I create content for consumption by my readers, but let’s say I lose my job. I could very well look to my efforts here at Asterisk to supplement my income. It would be pretty hard for me to differenciate between content delivered in a browser and in a news reader.
Content is content and if I take the time to write it, and I want to sell it, that should be my perogative.
I guess the main issue I have with you argument is that regardless of how you get articles and news (push or pull) the “ownership” still lies with the person who created it. I don’t have the same perception as you do, I guess is all.
Posted on September 1, 2004 11:13 AM | #
9. Jonathan M. Hollin said:
These two articles and their respective comments have been extremely thought-provoking for me. I have added my take on the subject to my weblog (since it was a little two long for the comments here).
Posted on September 2, 2004 06:28 AM | #
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