[Sigia-l] Corporate blogs, again

[anu gupta]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 09:20:21AM -0400, Dave Collins wrote:
> >>> Of course, you do not need a blog to provide an RSS feed.
> >> 
> >> True. But I'd say that blogs==RSS the same way that blogs==personal
> >> and independent. Not necessarily something that is inherent, but
> >> is more or less common use (or assumed).
> >
> >Truth be told, the only thing that tells me is that RSS is horribly
> >underused outside the blogsphere.
> >
> >I have dozens of blogs in my newsreader. One that I'm particularly excited
> >about is a feed updated once a week that provides info on service changes
> to
> >New York subway system by specific lines. It's syndicated by the cleverly
> >named "Disorient Express" site. The tragedy is that the MTA (Metropolitan
> >Transportation Authority) should be the ones providing the feed, as the
> info
> >is scraped from their site. I'm glad I didn't have to wait for some lonely
> >MTA train dispatcher to blog.:-)
> 
> I'm not really sure what quantifiable benefits RSS has over an email
> newsletter system. I suspect the biggest benefit it has is that it's new,
> thus marketers have not yet gotten around to exploiting it and mining it
> until it too is as glutted with junk and as useless as email.
> 
> It seems to me in my ignorance, that in the hypothetical non-RSS world, all
> your fave sites would have newsletters and you'd subscribe to them via your
> email. You'd get their headlines as often as they sent them. 
> 
> Here in the RSS world OTOH, you still subscribe, you just don't do it via
> your eddress(c), you do it through a news aggregator. Now, that doesn't mean
> they can't send you junk (eventually - they'll get around to it.)

- Subscribing to an email newsletter involves handing over a potentially valuable piece of data: your email address. Subscribing to an RSS feed only requires that you reveal your ip address, which for most people reveals far lass information. Subscrbing to a feed is also often just a quick drag and drop, rather than a tedious registration like process.

- The moment a feed you subscribe too starts to change into a marketing piece of junk, you delete the feed from your aggregator. That's it. No more feed. An email list gone rogue involves far more pain.

- The fact that RSS is XML and has real structure is good - you get better granularity [ie you can read one news item, and leave all the others marked as unread]. Typical email newsletters have several news items in them, and reading one leads to the whole email being marked as read.

- You get nice things like categories within a feed, allowing you to sort a feed in different ways.

However, that said, it's not like RSS is some kind of magic universe altering technology. It's just a file format that eases certain aspects of information exchange. Still useful though !

anu