This Way App

American Demographics, Sept 1, 2004 by Noah Rubin Brier

Byline: NOAH RUBIN BRIER

Everyone talks about how quickly things change on the Internet. Yesterday's innovation is passe tomorrow. In fact, since search engines surged into use about a decade ago, and especially since the introduction of Google six years ago, nothing has really transformed Net usage. What began with search engines, and was perfected by Google, was easy access. People could find that they were looking for; Web addresses became increasingly meaningless. All you had to do was "Google it." That Google is now a widely accepted verb is testimony to its impact. You might say that Google has gone from zero to 64 million in six years. It was a monumental change; nothing has come close - yet. RSS just may have the potential to be as monumental as Google.

"Search engines and e-mail are the current killer apps of the Web, and I think RSS is the next one" says Tom Barnes, CEO of Mediathink, an Atlanta-based consulting firm that released a white paper entitled "RSS: The Next Big Thing On Line" in July. For the uninitiated, RSS most commonly stands for Really Simple Syndication and essentially allows all types of information Web sites to broadcast their site updates to any user who subscribes to their RSS feeds. However, this is not your grandmother's syndication. There is no huge newswire with reporters around the world feeding articles to newspapers. Rather, users are in complete control of the information they receive. Employing a program called an aggregator or newsreader, users can access any of millions of RSS feeds ranging from front page stories in The New York Times to price drops on digital cameras via CNET, and every blog in between.

The power of RSS makes it difficult to compare it to traditional media. Calling it syndication evokes visions of I Love Lucy reruns or Oprah's talk show being broadcast across the country. But that isn't RSS. Many people describe RSS as TiVo for the Web. Part of what makes TiVo so appealing is the ability to pick and choose from across the network spectrum and record those shows you're interested in. RSS, however, records an entire opt-in spectrum of feeds, rather than one show at a time. It's like being able to choose your cable package with On Demand channels only. That way, when you get home from work, rather than watching what's on at that time, you are provided with a list of every show that has appeared on your chosen channel lineup since the last time you watched. This way, if you only watch ESPN, HBO and NBC, you only need to subscribe to those 3 stations. And for those who watch 100 different channels, RSS can handle that too by spidering across all the sites you've chosen and posting update signs and signals for each of them.

Control is the point. When you browse your updated RSS headlines in your aggregator, you only need to click through to where your interest lies. If The New York Times business section has no stories that interest you on a given day, then there's no need to even visit the site. Prior to RSS, you had to check the site just to see the headlines.

"Content is king again," says Robert Mendez, CEO of NetHawk Interactive, Inc., a firm that works with tech companies on marketing strategies. NetHawk's message to its customers is simple: embrace RSS technology. "Augment the marketing you do now with RSS. Take all that information you're shoving down people's throats through e-mails, newsletters and Web sites and start a few feeds." With e-mail inboxes cluttered with newsletters, and spam filters working so effectively that they are blocking even non-spam marketing messages, Mendez thinks RSS is a good choice for getting a company's word out. "E-mail is where knowledge goes to die. Everyone has a stack of folders in their e-mail, have you ever tried to find something that happened 6 months ago? What this new channel [RSS] allows is for you to wrap yourself around the information and search it very easily."

RSS changes the way people access information on the Internet. "It puts the onus of matching readers to content where it belongs: on the publisher," explains Clay Shirky, a highly respected voice in the world of social software and a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. "The old expectation was that the user would do all the work. Most sites are not updated that frequently. What RSS does is it lets people off the hook for searching. Everyone's pattern before RSS was, 'I'm not going to pay attention to a little Web site, I'm going to go to the big guys and trust them to look at everything else.'" Now, anyone with an aggregator has the power to pull information from any number of sources as it is published. You don't need the big guys and you don't need to visit 10 different Web sites for information in 10 different areas. You can plug the feeds for those sites into your aggregator and be informed of their updates as they happen.

More and more publishers are jumping on board every day. In July, The Wall Street Journal added RSS feeds and The New York Times upped its feed count to 27, thereby allowing users interested in specific sections to receive headlines for just those sections. They also added a feed of the most e-mailed articles, allowing users to read only those articles which others found interesting enough to send to their friends or colleagues. For the Times, RSS drives a million page views a month. The news organization's feeds come with the headline and a one-line abstract. These feeds are also completely ad-free, although when users click through to read the full story, they get the normal site advertising. Catherine Levine, vice president, product, business development and strategy for New York Times Digital, doesn't see adding advertising to RSS any time soon. "If it turns out to be a viable advertising medium we would certainly consider it," Levine states. "Our goal with RSS is to distribute the headlines; it's really a distribution point for us."