Coles recants over RSS

I see that Malcolm Coles has now realised that he was wrong to suggest that newspapers turn off their RSS feeds

Writing on his blog he says

The point I was trying to make was that there didn't seem much point having RSS icons in your header (Express) or by your search box (Mirror), or offering a brilliant RSS mashup feature (Guardian), or having RSS icons by each section of your news area (Independent) etc etc - but not doing anything to educate people about what they could do with all this.

but recognises that

RSS is great - I use it. It doesn't run itself as some people seem to think. But it should still be available for people who want to use it, whether to monitor output or to create mashups or whatever.

RSS v Twitter

There has been quite an online conversation over the past couple of days over whether newspapers should give up on Rss feeds.

It followed a post on Paul Bradshaw's Online journalism blog in which Malocolm Coles dared to suggest that as the feeds were being taken up less and less the time was right to switch to twitter.

There has been a staggering 40 replies of which I added by twopennyth worth replying that

Both Twitter and RSS should compliment each other.After all it is zero cost for both and the the more exposure the better,surely.
In these difficult times for the media,every avenue should be used to promote content

a view that I would stand by although I think that Malcolm makes a good point in the comments when he says that

For the general public, RSS feeds are a mystery. If they subscribed to one from a newspaper, they would soon be overwhelmed by the quantity of items in their RSS reader.

I use Bloglines and I have to say that some of the updating is a long way behind,consequently I end up picking a lot of feeds directly from twitter,but that then means managing twitter better than I probably do.

RSS has reached a peak

I happen to think that RSS is one of the best tools that a journalist can have so I was surprised to read that its use may be recahing a peak

According to research by Forrester

Nearly half of interactive marketers use RSS, but consumer adoption has only reached 11%. Of the consumers who haven't adopted RSS, most don't understand how RSS is relevant to their lives and the way they seek information. If marketers expect to reach a critical mass of consumers by using content syndication, then they must take on the burden of education

Mind you as Micro Persuasion says

Still, while feed adoption may have crested the idea of online opt-in communications is just getting going. The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehichles that bring content you care about to you. In each case, you're total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you.
RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.

Guardian top when it comes to RSS feeds

Martin Belam has published the list of the top 100 british newspaper RSS feeds.

He says that http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2007/11/top_100_british_newspaper_feeds_in_google_reader.php

in the absence of any kind of audited figures from the papers themselves, it is one of the few public indications of the relative audiences for RSS feeds.

The results perhaps were not unsurprisng with the Guardian getting almost twice as many feeds as its nearest rival the FT.

Good news also for the likes of Charlie Brooker who by far outweights the others in traffic although as Martin points out

I think that tends to suggest something about the kind of audience that use RSS feeds.

The question that has to be posed of course is whether this is a reliable guide to internet traffic or whether it is simply a small sample of a compartmentalised audience.