Monday
31Aug2009
RSS is about as dead as blogging
Monday, August 31, 2009 at 11:27PM If I had a penny for every time over the, nearly, ten years I have been blogging that some pundit has declared it dead I'd be pretty well off. Now they are doing the same to RSS and yet RSS is more useful than ever.
Firstly Google Reader has made it really easy to create "bundles" of feeds and allow others to piggy back on others' ability to find the good stuff. For those of you interested here is my Google Reader Bundle.
Secondly I love this idea from Steve Rubel. You can search your archive of feeds in Google Reader. This means that in addition to taking pot luck on the wild and woolly web I can now search the writings of the smart folks whose RSS feeds I follow for specific topics to see what they have said about them.
Reader Comments (5)
I absolutely agree - I've never used RSS more and like Twitter I "get it" more day by day.
Ultimately you can rely instead on peer recommendations on what to read ...but you can guarantee those peers are using RSS, even if you aren't.
Equally those people who said Twitter had killed blogs...what were all those tweets pointing at?
I think RSS has yet to catch on properly to be honest. Most people I talk with have little or no concept of its functionality nor capabilities. Lately I have been able to show how it works very quickly and provide some great results to the people interested. So in terms of it dying I'd say it's slowly coming to life.
That is partly because RSS solves a problem that until now most people didn't know they had!
Cormac makes a good point. I agree it is not dying. As for blogs, sadly a lot of blogs I used to read have stopped posting or disappeared completely (domain and all), but new blogs pop up all the time. Just the way it goes really.
I must have stared at the search box on my Google Reader page countless times, and I never knew you could do that! Thanks, Euan