RSS feedMaybe it’s just me and too many bitch sessions in the Synop back room, but I’m still amazed at the support RSS gets from people in the industry, particularly A-list bloggers, as a method for control of the content pipeline. I understand the excitement about RSS as a simple unstructured publishing mechanism or “data tap”, I really do, but not as a method of controlling the publishing pipeline.
Jon Udel for example (whose writing I enjoy and usually find insightful) implied today that with RSS, he had control of the channel. Jon was referring to the ability to opt in to a feed, which is arguably having some control of what he sees, but this is not actually having control of the channel from a publishing of content perspective.
RSS is like buying a hardcopy edition of InfoWorld. I have control over whether I buy it, but I don’t have any control over the content, the opinion, the focus, or the emotional or financial interests of InfoWorld, the authors, the editor or the publisher. I can turn the page if I want, but only when I see content I’m trying to filter out, such as adverts etc. Keeping the InfoWorld analogy, with RSS, I can only buy the last few issues, and if I miss an issue, well, I miss an issue. And yes, aggregator clients are starting to allow filtering and searching across feeds, as well as archiving, which alleviates some of these problems, but really they’re just making up for RSS’ inability to give us what we really want, better control of content.
Without reiterating this earlier post too much, we’re still consuming what the publisher has decided to push to us. I agree that the push vs. pull argument depends mostly on perspective, but when faced with a choice between media companies pushing me their selective content vs. my pulling from them the content that I’ve decided I’m interested in, there’s really no choice in the matter.
With Reuters and other big players now publishing RSS feeds, the big question is whether the big media outlets will let go of their traditional audience as product to advertisers business model, of which an RSS feed changes little except consumer perception, or whether they can finally embrace a business model where the actual content is the product, not people. Some will resist, because they know no other way, but the smart ones will make the shift, and consumers will speak out with their cheque books.
In the meantime, RSS is a safe bet. It protects the big media companies from having to change a thing. A couple of buzzword compliant data streams, push some advertising content down the pipe to compensate and invalidate the consumer’s move from the web to a reader client, and they’ll be safe for another few years. Safe as houses, so to speak.
However, give us access to their entire content database, with a good content focused business model, and then we’ll start to see the control people are talking about.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)