Reading and thinking about the whole RSS experience brings to mind a parallel activity that I usually do support my reading habit..that is reading of books. My practice is to read reviews and from there search the library catalogue for what I am interested in and either add the title to a 'My List' feature or directly reserve the title and ask the library to send it to my nearest branch.
I do very little browsing of the shelves in a library now and go directly to the titles that interest me and place a hold.
I see simimilarities in the world of RSS where fewer users actually browse for information on websites and instead go directly to the information or links of interest and organise a delivery method which is convenient to them.
Robin Good asks 'is e-mail publishing dead?' and I would ask instead is the website approaching it's demise, or the well designed and interesting website? Why would web designers place any emphasis on creating an attactive websites when many users are only interested in headlines and getting to their information as fast as they can and no longer taking any time to browse a site or explore and go off on a tangent to somewhere unplanned ?
To support the busy lives of users of people, they are only concerned with receiving exactly what they want as efficiently as possible. They do not want to be bothered with erroneous information and time wasting irrelevancies. They need it now and and only the exact information that they want. While I can see the importance of this in the business world, where time is money, I am not so sure that this is where many other users want to be.
From my own limited experience with RSS feeds to the Google aggregator I can sense a pressure to visit this site and read all the feeds that are arriving daily. I do not do this as I don't have the time, but the information is there building and building daily as I have set it up to do.
For many users who subscribe to many RSS feeds, I can see a pressure to read everything that is sent, after all, that is what they are interested in and have organised to happen and need to stay current and on top of the latest news. I don't know the practice of the subscribers of many feeds, but maybe they are selective in their reading, but then why subscribe to something that they are not going to read.
I do not want to be seen as criticising the practice of those receiving many RSS feeds, but I just wanted to step back and look at it from a distance and see it as part of the speeding up of 'life' especially in this age where there is no way that most of us can keep up with the daily advances of technology. The Internet is so vast that any way to pick and chose information of interest is an enormous time saver but lets hope that there will still be a way to take the 'scenic route'!
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3 comments:
H Jane! I really like your post. I think you make some interesting insights and show the other side to this RSS debate. When I was reading the email debate - I intially thought the same thing about the demise of websites. However, I think they serve somewhat different functions - a website, as I understand it, is more about representing your org by publishing info that represents,markets or sells your products or services. An RSS aggregator provides a delivery mechanism that provides a glimpse/ snapshot into some of this info/products/services. RSS can be integrated with mainstream borwsers,websites, etc -but I do not think this technology will be mature enough to replace websites (at least not for now!)
Hi Jane,
You make an interesting point about feeling a certain amount of pressure to visit the news aggregator site frequently to keep up with all of the feeds. Google Reader displays all of your subscriptions and the number of new posts in parenthesis. It does make me a bit antsy when I see that one of my feeds has more than three new items. This pressure to read all of the feeds is annoying, but it was more annoying when I had to visit every site a bunch of times a day to check if there were any new posts. I guess I can live with the pressure!
Hi Jane,
I am inspired by your post “I know what I want, and I want it now”; it is so true that we are starting to treat the library as we would the interent – we go where we want, and spend less time browsing. Last night I went out with a friend and he asked me if I know what I want before I go into a book store, or if I browse. Straight away I said “I know what I want”, and he said that he likes to browse. So this duality still exists, but I think it is being phased out.
In terms of Good and her comments about email, I also feel that email still holds a place in our internet experience. Though reading about the positive and negative aspects did open my eyes to some pitfalls of email (like SPAM), but RSS is a one way communication, whereas email is a two way street. Facebook is a whole other issues, should libraries have a facebook page? I wonder…
RSS, as you say, allows us to read what we want from the sources we want, and this eliminates all of that SPAM. As we are busy people we may not have time to read all of the feeds we subscribe to, but it is nice to know we can, I suppose. The aspect I like about RSS is that information is coming to us, not us seeking information.
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