Last month I wrote about the Fear of RSS and why companies should learn to embrace the technology. Today, I found a review on Forbes.com of the new Industry Standard website. The worst part of the website according to them is:
The site lets you subscribe to RSS feeds, a complicated, XML-related way of reading news which doesn’t serve much purpose here.
Say what?!?! Clearly Forbes has lost touch with the world of today because in my experience RSS is as simple as putting the url of the site in my newsreader and having it check the feed daily. When it’s updated it reads the new headlines and lets me know. Heck, even if I didn’t have a newsreader or web browser the RSS format lets me read the article just by looking at the code itself.
It’s sad to see a major publication post such opinions which are obviously ill-informed.
About Mike Rundle
Very clearly. What are they thinking over there at Forbes.com?
The more I try to understand it, the less I understand it. I mean this really baffles me. It’s not like the RSS feed is getting in the way of the site. I mean you don’t have to use the feed to read the site.
Forbes reminds me of a 1960 mainframe that needs replacing.
Fascinating. Boris Berezovskiy, a famous Russian businessman, said on 2004-05-20 he suited the Forbes magazine. The final desicion was to sign an agreement with Forbes which contained the sentence stating that Forbes’ statements were false. Berezovskiy claimed Forbes is an unprofessional source. Knowing this, I still think Forbes Russia is quite an unusual media.
A bit ironic from a company who publishes their own RSS feeds
Clearly Forbes haven’t seen the last Apple keynote. I would do my Steve Jobs impressions, but it wouldn’t do it justice. (Boom! There it is! Boom! It’s done!). It really upsets me when people say things like this without doing the necessary research behind a statement. Its just lazy. Oh well, let’s find comfort in that fact that Forbes simply look dated by their remark. Hopefully the world’s leaders use something a little more up-to-date than Forbes as their homepage. Perhaps they subscribe to RSS feeds and read them on the train each morning…
I think this statement comes from people who assume that the RSS feed will provide their content to users, but also by doing this in a format they don’t control, circumvent the advertising on their site (which is why they’re able to exist).
Wall St Journal’s feeds solve this by only giving you a headline and the link–which is EXTREMELY annoying, as I’m told nearly nothing by just the headline alone.
There’s a bit more to fear than is convered here–they’re at odds with a distribution format that won’t allow them to stay in business (maybe).
I personally don’t think providing the excerpts is a big deal–but when weighing the decision of if something (RSS feeds) with a relatively early stage adopter base will drop page impressions–they’re going to err towards not dropping page impressions.
My personal feeling on this is that if your content is compelling enough, then that alone will draw people to your website. Your feed is a mechanism to allow people to quickly read the basic gist of an article or post. If they are first timers to you then it will either attract or repel. If they are regulars then they are using your feed as a way to keep regularly updated with you; because you’re worth it. If a content provider writes a decent feed then they are reaching out to yet another small minority of visitors that will read the feed and occasionally visit their site. It’s these pockets of visitors that we cannot ignore, because they count in the long term. The fact that these people (the content providers) will then flood this newly-won visitor with advertising and crap is their own self-created problem.
To me, RSS is just another way of getting a message out to more people.
A lot of effort goes into getting people to go to a particular website. The mistake that I see over 95% of people doing is not giving these same people a) what they want when they get there b) a load of grief in the form of registration and adverts when they arrive or c) not giving them a reason to return and recommend to their friends.
By reducing the number of ways of attracting customers to your website, or readers to your magazine in this case, you’re only cutting your own nose off to spite your face.
How did what I said in my last comment relate to Forbes? Forbes’ lazy journalist is saying that RSS is “a complicated, XML-related way of reading news which doesn’t serve much purpose here”, which basically means that in the future when they are wanting to reach a larger number of readers they can’t really use RSS without looking hypocritical. Forbes in this case are letting an off-the-cuff remark mould their future in my opinion.
Are you sure we’re talking about the same Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/rss.shtml
What I see here is the exact opposite of your comments!
Exactly Eric. That is what we call hypocrisy. Obviously the person writing the review doesn’t even use the Forbes site.
RSS feeds remove context; a well-crafted story is deserving of informed typography and interesting design. To be critical of those who remove context is to miss the core of design, a somewhat abstract shaping of information. Sure, most don’t or can’t create harmony between content and design, but to remove context is to do disservice to thoughtful writing worthy of this accompaniment.
As a follow-up, I’d be more interested in using RSS feeds as a way to indicate content has changed then to deliver said content. We need better software (browsers) that can intelligently detect specific content changed in a significant way (e.x. a new story, blog post, photograph or artwork, etc). I would imagine some middleware might trip up said services with certain dynamic content.
But this wasn’t a knock on companies or websites that wish their readers to read their content on their site and not through RSS feeds. This was a knock on a company who claimed that RSS was too hard of technology to use. If that was the only means to receive the information then maybe I could understand, but you can still go to the site and read the content in its context.
That is the problem we have with Forbes.
This is yet another example of journalistic ineptitude…
I can hardly recount the number of times I have read so called “tech journalist” being off-based, factually incorrect or providing personal opinions as fact.
Whether it is Forbes, USA Today or the NY Times, they need to go back to the basics and get their facts straight.
I think many traditional journalists are scared of RSS and the power it gives regular people to disseminate information on the web.
Instead of complaining about it or making negative remarks, they should be embracing it.
Off topic: you know, if you preview your post and then post it you end up with double paragraph tags
The most likely scenario here is that the editor was just out of the loop on RSS and missed the point entirely. There has been a lot of noise about this error, and I would be very surprised if the same editor or any editor at Forbes made that mistake again.
What’s most interesting to me is how the blogosphere is correcting the mistake for this journalist. Clearly, mistakes like this were easier to get away with prior to blogs, but this new medium is forcing publications that proclaim editorial authority to either report more professionally or get destroyed by their own audience.
[Disclaimer: I work for The Standard.]
My feeling is that they dont really know what RSS is. They click the little orange XML button and see the XML structure and think, “what the hell is the point of this?” They’ve probably never opened an RSS reader to understand exactly what it’s used for.