I couldn’t have said it better. Jay Allen’s April 1, 2004 weblog entry, RSS discourages visits!?, brilliantly sums up the core reason why I think that anyone who provides any periodically updated content online SHOULD offer an RSS feed. (I touched on that point in this entry last week.)
Here’s my take on Allen’s take…
Allen begins by noting the faulty logic exhibited by Dan Benjamin, creator of the tech blog The Hivelogic Narrative, which includes a collection of current links called the “Bits sidebar.”
On March 31, 2004, Benjamin wrote, “The Bits sidebar is updated regularly and frequently. The Bits sidebar has no RSS feed, and the existing RSS feed does not reflect changes to the Bits sidebar. This is intentional, and encourages people to actually visit this website rather than just scan the RSS feed. What may seem like silence is actually activity.”
Now, to be fair, Benjamin does not appear to be entirely anti-RSS. There does exist a feed for Hivelogic – although this feed does not appear to be announced on Hivelogic. (I found it through Feedster’s FeedFinder) He just hasn’t created a separate feed for the Bits section of his blog.
Still, Allen makes this key observation: “Not publishing a feed in order to get people to come to your site is akin to not advertising your business so that people have to come into the store frequently to see what you have in stock. Worse, doing so – as some have – for the purpose of guiding visitors in so that they may fully appreciate the site’s grand visual design is nothing short of hubris. If a site (or regularly updated part of a site) doesn’t have an RSS feed, they essentially don’t exist to me.”
Here’s the thing: Feeds (whether RSS, Atom, whatever) are fast becoming more and more popular with Net users because they save time, are spam-proof, and are more manageable and reliable than e-mail alerts. True, not everyone likes or uses feeds, but then not everyone who accesses the Web likes or uses e-mail, either. People who prefer RSS feeds for keeping up with their favorite sites are a growing part of nearly every online audience, and it’s foolish for online publishers to ignore that trend.
I agree with Allen – online publishers who neglect or refuse to offer feeds will indeed gradually become “invisible” to a growing part of their potential audience.
If you liked my post, feel free to subscribe to my rss feeds
BlogoSquare
2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)