Making it Really Simple

Forrester has a new study ‘What’s holding RSS back?’ According to the report, RSS usage is at 11%, and most people don’t use it because they can’t see its relevance in their lives. You can get some good snapshots of the report here.

Now, I realise that because of the contents of this blog, a lot of readers (at least about 40 odd ) understand RSS. For those who don’t I’ll attempt a bit of evangelism, at the end of this post. Meanwhile, Mashable has an interesting take on the report. While I agree that the usage might be much higher and that most sites have it in some form or the other, they don’t necessarily have the user consciously utilising it. Facebook’s news feed is a typical example. So, I would side with this view on the geekiness of RSS. I started subscribing to feeds only about a year back, and gave an RSS feed for my blog much later. So, I can identify with the intimidation some might feel with regards to feeds and RSS and subscribing… On an aside, if you asked people in India about RSS, we’d most likely have strong opinions on it, but that’s only because there’s a Hindu nationalist party by that name. 😉

However, the best tangential take on this report that I read happens to be here. In addition to a take on the entire subject, this post points out that newspapers could have a great role in making RSS mainstream. This is because newspapers have always been aggregators and have learnt the art of packaging the commodity called ‘news’. The packaging results from an understanding of the consumer’s needs. This is all the more interesting since a new PWC study says that traditional media has about 5 years left, before the death clock kicks in (varies for different markets) I’m wondering though, whether this role would be  equally applicable to other traditional media – radio and TV. While newspapers might start out as favourites, increasing fragmentation could redefine media preferences. TV, for example, could provide all that the newspaper’s online version does, and add a visual angle to it. The difference between reading about Chandrayaan (India’s lunar mission) and watching it. Do you think that once news becomes a commodity (as it has online) TV has a competitive advantage over newspapers? (among traditional media players) Or is it going to be a pure play new media player like say, Instablogs, who will steal their thunder?

until next time, subscribe 🙂

and now, for some

RSS Evangelism

Why would you need RSS?

When you started browsing around the net, you would have liked a few sites and you could track them daily to see if there was something interesting. Over time, the number of favourites grew and sometimes you’re missing on good content because you forgot to check. Even if you didn’t forget, it would be a pain to keep checking all the while. What if you could have a tool that would alert you when your favourite site was updated?

Yeah?

Yeah. These tools are called readers. It can be web based or desktop based. For now, I’ll stick to the web based type. There are several sites which offer this service (its for free). Pageflakes, Yahoo, and the example I’m going to use – Google Reader.

So how do we start?

Click on this link which will open a new window – Google Reader. If you have an existing GMail account, you can use that, else you’d have to create a Google account first. Once you login for the first time, Google has a fairly good tutorial on how to use it. But I’ll still do a bit of explanation. How does Google know which are the sites you need to get updates about? You have to connect your fave sites with Google, so that it picks up the updates from there. This is called subscription.

How do you do that?

On the left panel of your Reader page, you’ll see a button ‘Add Subscription’. Here’s where you need to enter the url of your favourite site. Shameless that I am, I shall use the example of this blog. The url is www.manuscrypts.com/brants . Once you type it and press enter, the ‘feed’ of this blog gets added to your reader. You can see it on the left. And the next time you log in, it will have the number of  new updates in brackets.

Sometimes you would come across a blog, like it, but would be too lazy to log in to the reader or remember the site. Most sites now would have a button that looks like this or a variation of this (like the button on top of this page), or even this . Click on the button, and then you would see an ‘Add to Google’, ‘Subscribe with Google’ or Click on this, and it would take you to a page that gives you a choice between Homepage and Reader. Since we’ve set this up on Reader, click that and you’ll be asked to log in. See, it pays not to be lazy 😉   So, keep adding sites and checking your Reader regularly. You can do many things lime sharing some items with your GMail friends (using the share button at the end of each post) , organising your favorite sites into folders like say, Personal Blogs’,  ‘brands’, ‘social media’ etc.  It might look like a big deal or a difficult thing to do now, but trust me, it will add a whole new dimension to your browsing and time management. In case you get stuck, shoot me a mail – manuscrypts @ gmail dot com, and I’ll help you out. 🙂