An Excess of RSS

Here is an irony for you. There is a growing number of people who consume their news and information exclusively through aggregated headline readers, made possible by the magic of RSS feeds. If you are reading this in your mail client, you are clearly not one of them. Your reluctance is entirely reasonable. After all, push content is nothing new and for the most part, nothing spectacular. In the late nineties, Microsoft experimented with web channel subscriptions in Internet Explorer. And then there was push pioneer Pointcast, who we all remember for the $450 million deal that they didn't do. However this time round, the buzz around syndication has a different flavour and not one that may be as pleasant tasting to the media status quo.

The major driver of change is personalisation. With increasing variety of information sources and specialisation of interests, readers want more control over the selection of content. While editorial decisions made by news organisations are still influential and important, but they are only one perspective that is now competing with an army of bloggers whose highly focused domain expertise makes them ideal filters for determining the daily relevance of news stories. Unlike the early push content incarnations which relied on desktop clients to manage subscriptions, the aggregated news readers of today such as Bloglines and Newsgator are web based, and will in the future be platform independent.

Sure - the ability to put your own virtual newspaper together each morning is interesting, but the most compelling characteristic of the emerging syndication space are the network effects of consumption. When you are reading your feed of the New York Times in Bloglines, you can also see who else is subscribing to that feed, and all the other publications and weblogs they themselves subscribe to. Similarly, users of the social bookmarking service del.icio.us, can track other people's reading habits through the use of common tags. Throw in weblog search tools such as Technorati, which ranks websites based on the number of external references made to it by other blog sites and a powerful realisation strikes you. The very reading habits of millions of users are working as a collaborative filter to reduce the complexity of navigating the volume of news sources on the web.

If you think that sounds like a wake up call to the world's incumbent media barons - you are right. While RSS advertising models are still in flux, the cards are on the table for a shift away from content destination sites to content aggregation services. Google are already trialling a beta program of Adsense for feeds which will insert content matched advertising into RSS readers. At the other end of the spectrum, traditional newspaper groups are considering partnering with white label technology providers to offer their audiences branded news aggregation software tools. But as you might imagine, in a world where all content becomes available by feed, it may be feed aggregators and not content providers who have the best chance of commercialising eyeballs while avoiding the costs of producing original material.

As a quick survey of the available tools will make obvious, it is still very much a market catering for early adopters. Weblogs may have hit big time in terms of readership, but for the average consumer - news aggregators and social bookmark tools are still the arcane domain of Slashdot geeks and open source cult members. However if you look at the growth of Yahoo's RSS reader, Ask Jeeves' acquisition of Bloglines, and Google's recent personalisation product - it is inevitable that RSS aggregation will form a core component of the consumer portal feature set. For that reason it is not surprising that non-aligned players, such as Newsgator are now moving swiftly to corner opportunities in the enterprise sector.

It is too early to tell whether enterprise RSS will be a golden goose or a white elephant. Certainly the possibilities seem credible. Using RSS feeds rather than email to keep employees, stakeholders, sales teams or customers informed of company news and opportunities represents both a reduced strain on corporate IT systems as well as the creation of a more effective communications channel. However, as is often the case in major corporate IT projects - it is never just one piece of technology which needs fixing. Tackling the labyrinth of major business systems and practices, unless you are a giant like SAP, is a daunting task for most bootstrapped startups.

Like Pop, the web may ultimately eat itself. The blogosphere is becoming so self referential, it at times threatens to collapse under its own weight. A world full of feeds is no guarantee that there will be any less amount of useless or just plain wrong information in circulation - if anything there will be more compared to the belle époque of newspaper journalism. But like it or not, when it comes to content the wisdom of crowds is likely to be the prevailing one.

Comments

[alan]

Two reasons I read Fourth Estate via email rather than RSS:

1) RSS is largely free of window-dressing. I need my reading leavened with graphics, even if it's only an or two and a sultry pic of Mike Walsh.

2) RSS feeds get 'pulled' from my reader, not pushed to my inbox. Insightful and relevant though it may be, I'd never remember to read Fourth Estate without that email reminder. I can barely remember my wedding anniversary, much less when the next edition of Fourth Estate is ready for reading.

RSS has a role, and it works as a primary media for some, but I think us masses will always want something more pushy and more flashy to remind us to consume our media.

[Ben Barren]

Spot on Mike.

Content creators if they are proactive with RSS and continue to produce their own content will be able to more than adequately compete against aggregators.

On first glance, CNN.com and other media dynasties must be worried that Yahoo News is now the number 1 news site without owning any news content. What it does own though is consumer friendly tools for subscribing to and sorting the news which is of interest to me.

Throw in Yahoo network tools such as 360 where I can syndicate my blogs, favourite news sources to my friends, and CNN should really be worried. If they thought replicating a newspaper online was going to win the digital news war, it might have worked in the 20th century, but not in the 21st.

Its not all doom and gloom for publishers though. In verticals like employment, market leaders monster and careerbuilder dwarf the new meta-classifieds services such as oodle, simplyhired and workzoo(that also run RSS feeds) - to the point where the startups dont even register, yet.

Further, if a publisher doesnt want to be scraped it can run robots, publish short RSS feeds, charge a subscription fee for the full feed, or not use RSS feeds at all; But that may end up being like deciding to not want to be in Google.

Contrary to the cannibalisation argument, like all other new technologies, RSS experience to date shows that the new aggregators drive traffic to content owners, and initial results of New York Times and Wall Street Journal, is that traffic increases once using RSS.

The other interesting ancillary trends learnt by bloggers and RSS readers is that, more than 50% of major blogs traffic comes from RSS readers. Without RSS, most blogs traffic would at least be cut in half !

The math is simple - with RSS I view more sites, and hence produce more sellable ad impressions. (which can be delivered in the RSS reader or on the page of content I view)

Consumers once they use RSS services find it an easier way to view a site, rather than remembering the URL of every site they visit.

Scoble, Microsoft's most famous blogger, who is rumoured to be starting a blogging religion and has a new title bestowed on him recently of CBO : Chief Blogging Officer (tagged by users of course not Microsoft), has over 1000 feeds running.

I run 200+ which I read 3-5 times a day at different levels of concentration : Dave Winer the father of RSS calls this the 'River of News' analogy - sites, headlines, text flowing past, just like a Saturday newspaper where I pick and choose the mastheads, columnists, sections and article type I am interested in : Something the browser and bookmark feature, and pushed email has been woeful in helping the online media consumer do.

Who could remember 1000+ feeds URLs and quickly check for updates ?

Long term too, content aggregators will not be able to keep all the RSS ad revenue : It will be apportioned between the service (eg bloglines, newsgator, feedtagger, feedster) that acquires the customer (for which they have costs) and the publisher (who provides the content and consumer experience)

It is a delicate balance between aggregator and publisher but a balance will be worked out, because with RSS growing at 1% a day (compound growth rate of 1389%) no publisher can ignore its customer's wishes.

Its the web. If you dont provide it (RSS) someone else will.

Publishers, by being proactive about RSS, and coding its feeds into the correct ontologies that consumers want to subscribe to (eg 3br houses within 50kms of Palo Alto between $700K-$900K) will be rewarded with the network effect of more consumers using their services.

By driving new RSS services publishers will also be able to put their services before the hundreds of thousands of other feeds offered to the consumer. (Just as happens in the search engine industry with google and yahoo)

The intersection of the search and media industries which RSS helps drive, is going to be a fascinating battle, and companies that specialise in the various technologies which contribute to analytics, RSS ad serving, enterprise versions, and small business RSS enablement have a strong future indeed.

Pop may indeed eat itself, but for RSS that is the aim : It seeks to be a successful change agent within an organisation, integrating itself into various parts of the technology chain which customers (internal and external) are demanding.

We won't be seeing orange XML or RSS buttons soon, we will just take for granted the various ways we subscribe to and receive all the information we need on whatever device, for whatever reason.

Myself, I could never go back from RSS, and the sooner the publishers recognise this not to be a geek trend, but the most important development since the browser, the more we can imagine and improve all the various applications outside of just news feeds that debate is currently centred around.

57 Channels and nothing on my MTV may have been a catch-cry from the Information Superhighway Point Cast days, but RSS allows me to subscribe to any of the millions of streams running around on the Internet of relevance to me.

I love it, and I hope publishers will too.

[James Richardson]

Man, when is someone going to bring RSS out to Australia ? I find the US services dont have enough Australian content, and they are pretty slow too.

Any ideas Mark ?

[Robert Warlov]

Unfortunately, most news is replicated from the one or two sources that got the story. So an AP report is on Yahoo, Netscape, MSN, and ten other places on the Internet, but it's still the same story.

But you reminded me of something I started doing some weeks back and have been draging my feet on. I've been gathering world newspapers to read the same stories from they're different cultural vantage points. I think that's more interesting- the spin an english newspaper might put on a story from Iraq or an Egyptian or Chinese newspaper! Getting feeds of this kind of variety can broaden the perspective and lead to a better understanding of how others see us.

[Greg Linden]

Very interesting post, Mike. At one point, you said, "The very reading habits of millions of users are working as a collaborative filter to reduce the complexity of navigating the volume of news sources on the web."

Have you thought about what might happen if this is taken to the extreme? What if the reading habits of our readers literally are a collaborative filter? What if your feed reader learned your interests, looked at what people like you liked, and helped surface news articles you would find interesting and useful?

That's what we're building at Findory. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it.

[John Powlton]

Has anyone stopped to consider the effect on Internet traffic of blogging ourselves to bits? SEO news feeds have pushed rss as the key to high search rakings. As webmasters follow suit it is who can outblog who.

Start 6 or a dozen blogs at high ranking sites and you can link your site to high ranked web pages for free. If each of the 6 blogs has 10 syndicated feeds with 20 items that is 1200 items to update every hour. This isnt so bad on blogsites where the content is syndicated for lots of users but consider that users import blogs into their web sites and cross blogging between blogs.

The data transfers don't stop there because users still have to upload the data regardless of its final location. On top of all that the search engine have zillions more links to follow and index.

It is hard to see how the whole system will cope and how users will locate the original source for a feed from a search engine. Personally I think dynamic content has its place but we should not lose any quality static pages that offer superior layout and unique design features well beyond the capabilities for a blog.

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