Always good to see Bloglines getting some good ink in big media, such as “All The News You Choose — On One Page” in Business Week. While I’m not sure the story gets it quite right about RSS, there are a couple of choice quotes that resonated:
“We believe the world is moving from mass media to ‘my media,”‘ says Daniel L. Rosensweig, chief operating officer at Yahoo Inc., which last month began testing feeds to the 20 million subscribers of its My Yahoo service.
I like that way of putting it…I still can’t believe the effects that RSS has had on my personal consumption of information. It is truly amazing.
The biggies claim their brands will insulate them against upstarts. Says Catherine Levene, vice-president for product, business development, and strategy at New York Times Digital: “We think people will still come to [our site] for our editorial judgment.”
Um…why? The only reason I go to the New York Times site these days is if something in my feed piques my interest.
So is surfing dead? Not quite. While RSS is good for getting updates, it can’t do research or comparison shopping. And although it’s simpler to use than earlier technology, it remains more complicated than a browser.
More complicated than a browser? Maybe just a little. But the time you save makes the really, really tiny learning bump absolutely worth it. And I mean blogs are cool, but RSS is, well, cooler than cool.
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