Feeds: Getting Pretty Mainstream

Would love to hear your thoughts.

- Amy Gahran

Yes, that’s a great point, Gordon. Trying out anything new takes time and always feels strange or even uncomfortable at first.

- Amy Gahran

“* 74% contributed to a social network; 93% contributed to a user content site. Who says that forums are only for nuts, blogs for early adopters, and photo services for geeks? Everybody’s making content. Why do they do it? Feel part of a community, 31%; recognition from peers, 28%. Conversation.”

I suspect that this data may be skewed by the fact that it was based on a 40-question Internet survey. If it was based on a land-line phone survey of home owners, we’d probably get very different results.

But in my experience, the average news consumer and person with a non-media job often has no idea what an RSS reader or aggregator is. Sure, an adventuresome few have discovered iTunes for podcasts or some server-side aggregator, like My Yahoo.

It would be interesting to see surveys on what percentage of the general population have ever commented on a blog. Look at how few typically wrote to newspaper editors or called-in to radio stations — they’re a small percentage of the audience.

Using your analogy, I see plenty of people who are perfectly happy to plunk themselves down in a furnished apartment and feel very little need to customize it. I suspect that most people don’t want to hunt, they just want to be fed.

I’m now at the point where, if you don’t offer an RSS feed of any sort, I ain’t reading you. Simple.

I also note that I am still happy to visit a site if I want to, like this, add a comment, but I also monitor several sites which don’t update very often… using their RSS feed means I don’t CARE that they don’t update very often because it doesn’t cost me anything. If they do post, Google Reader lets me know all about it.

So, full feeds matter.

Ohh and if you are just undertaking this dare, DO stick with it for at least two weeks. It took me almost two years of continual trying to ‘get’ the whole syndication thing, now that I have, I’m happily creating my own little sofa dent. (OK, maybe not so little).