“Content Feeds” – try explaining what ‘content’ is to someone who only uses a computer to play solitare, check email or click links.

“RSS Feeds” – forget it.

“Site Feeds” – ahhh, stuff that is fed to you from a Web Site. Now we’re getting somewhere…

But of course, as Nick pointed out, a mindless list still works wonders as link bait.

I guess I just give people more credit for understanding things, as long as you take the time to present the information in a way that makes sense.

I think you misunderstood about the post there at Micro Persuasion. I obviously can’t speak for him but here’s my opinion.

Steve has been an RSS fan for long. This is not the first time he advocates RSS. In a lot of occasions he pointed out the benefits of RSS compared to e-mail marketing. He didn’t think that the former will replace the latter.

I mean, clearly in this post, he tried to give examples of what RSS can bring to the table. Because many people still think that RSS is just a method to syndicate blog content. A sad but true fact. But through his post, we realize there are much more we can utilize RSS for.

Certainly I agree with you that the list can be more powerful if he mentioned about the “real” benefits of RSS.

But thanks for the many lists! I will follow some of them …

RSS contra Email consume

Knowing about RSS and how to use it is still one of my personal and business knowledge advantages. Letting the river of news flow by and have intelligent filters do the fishing for content is the deal. This could and was also be done with email but to consume the news and to publish the news is much easier achieved through RSS (and OPML).

Why is RSS easier?

The pragmatic view is that the same effects can be reached through email. I still receive a number of newsletters. But the very weak point in the comparison is the structure of an email. Email doesn’t have a body structure while RSS is XML and further on there is the micro structure of microformats (like tags).

I have no idea how many RSS feeds I am following but I do know that I have set up some nice ‘smart feeds’ which deliver filtered content to a very small number of important ‘must-read-boxes’. I.e. in one monitoring channel I have about 180 to 200 feeds. I don’t look at the single feeds, I only follow the filtered output sorted by date. This way I am able to follow the news with a lag of about an hour after publishing which is real-time compared to the search engine lag (i.e. Google alerts via email).

If people don’t buy all the RSS advantages, well, let them stay with email … And we are not even talking about RSS publishing advantages …

Productivity: Getting multi-paragraph newsletters or following the usenet groups, every single one/article with a different design doesn’t really help compared with smart and fast RSS consumption.

Wasn’t he the guy who said it’s not about the traffic?

Do we post thoughtful, insightful pieces and see them bomb because the lowest common denominator is pretty damn low, or do we post crap like that because some folks will link to ANYTHING with RSS in the title? and moreso if it’s in a nice handy list that implies quality content without necessarily delivering it