Why isn't there a Blog email subscription standard?
My friend Jon called me tonight, who due to a foot injury is spending some extra time at home these days. Luckily he has a blog to keep him busy. Nice odeo.com inclusion!
He was asking me if there was an easy way for people to "subscribe" to his blog and get an update whenever he made a new post. Easy, I thought, with vision of RSS solutions passing through my head. As I attemptd to explain to him the concept behind RSS, how to link to his atom.xml page from his blogger template while sorting through all the HTML and then instructing his readers what to do with that page, it occurred to me how very un-simple this whole thing is.
Sure, I'm an RSS junkie. I've got the Newgator Outlook Edition which checks my feeds 10 times a day and updates them immediately in a special folder at the bottom of my Outlook, just like I'm getting an email, except it's not email, it's RSS. It's brilliant, it's perfect, it works.
But most people I talk to don't have an RSS news reader nor do they even understand what it is. They understand MyYahoo, which now allows feeds, along with the Google Personalized Homepage (Google Reader never quite took off) and now the Web 2.0 adapters like Netvibes and Live.com (From Microsoft) are making it easy to customize your own homepage and pull in content from various sources. The idea here is to give you a starting point for all the news that's fit for you. Smart. But still, they all require that you visit your website to stay updated.
According to my Feedburner stats, 1/2 the people that subscribe to the JamBase Newsfeed do so through Firefox Live Bookmarks. Cool. Bloglinesand Google Desktop is 11% each and Newsgator online is 9%. Windows Media Center 2005 Feedreader, whatever that is, accounts for a few % and the rest are unknown. That means that most people looking at the feeds are doing so in a web browser.
Couldn't one of these services convert the posting into an email and send it to me? Somebody's gotta be doing that, right?
As much as I try to avoid it, I still find myself living in Outlook throughout the day. I'll take breaks and actually get work done for a while but sooner or later I'll go back to the inbox. Gmail is trying to be the center of the non-Outlook universe, but still hasn't integrated RSS in a way that is intuitive. The Gmail web clips top bar is more of a distraction than a resource, and they've got that great side bar area where "labels" are to do some great work. C'mon people! and integrate Calendar while you're at it.
So I digress. You can subscribe to any blog's RSS feed with your news reader, but what about the other 80% of people who don't really get that and just want an email when their favorite blogs are updated. Can't Blogger enable an email subscription feature which will allow people to subscribe to your blog and automatically get an email whenver you make a new post? Or are they all about the RSS that email is becoming passe and there's a real world desire to phase it out, even though most people use it still and the resulting effect is an inefficiency of communication.
It's amazing that with all of this technology at our disposal, things are still complicated. It's as though the cool stuff is being made at such a feverous pace that only the folks who are exhaustedly on top of it can try to keep up and enjoy it, while the rest of the world struggles to make some practical sense out of what they're supposed to do with an XML API.
We need better solutions. We need simple answers. There is far too much information and far too little time for us to try and figure it out or find it all.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That last word is really important, and we clearly haven't delivered on the promise of the fully connected MyWeb.
Back to Jon. What's he to do? If you've got the solution, you can comment below. Or better yet, visit his blog, subscribe to it through your news reader and tell him yourself.
Scloop!
He was asking me if there was an easy way for people to "subscribe" to his blog and get an update whenever he made a new post. Easy, I thought, with vision of RSS solutions passing through my head. As I attemptd to explain to him the concept behind RSS, how to link to his atom.xml page from his blogger template while sorting through all the HTML and then instructing his readers what to do with that page, it occurred to me how very un-simple this whole thing is.
Sure, I'm an RSS junkie. I've got the Newgator Outlook Edition which checks my feeds 10 times a day and updates them immediately in a special folder at the bottom of my Outlook, just like I'm getting an email, except it's not email, it's RSS. It's brilliant, it's perfect, it works.
But most people I talk to don't have an RSS news reader nor do they even understand what it is. They understand MyYahoo, which now allows feeds, along with the Google Personalized Homepage (Google Reader never quite took off) and now the Web 2.0 adapters like Netvibes and Live.com (From Microsoft) are making it easy to customize your own homepage and pull in content from various sources. The idea here is to give you a starting point for all the news that's fit for you. Smart. But still, they all require that you visit your website to stay updated.
According to my Feedburner stats, 1/2 the people that subscribe to the JamBase Newsfeed do so through Firefox Live Bookmarks. Cool. Bloglinesand Google Desktop is 11% each and Newsgator online is 9%. Windows Media Center 2005 Feedreader, whatever that is, accounts for a few % and the rest are unknown. That means that most people looking at the feeds are doing so in a web browser.
Couldn't one of these services convert the posting into an email and send it to me? Somebody's gotta be doing that, right?
As much as I try to avoid it, I still find myself living in Outlook throughout the day. I'll take breaks and actually get work done for a while but sooner or later I'll go back to the inbox. Gmail is trying to be the center of the non-Outlook universe, but still hasn't integrated RSS in a way that is intuitive. The Gmail web clips top bar is more of a distraction than a resource, and they've got that great side bar area where "labels" are to do some great work. C'mon people! and integrate Calendar while you're at it.
So I digress. You can subscribe to any blog's RSS feed with your news reader, but what about the other 80% of people who don't really get that and just want an email when their favorite blogs are updated. Can't Blogger enable an email subscription feature which will allow people to subscribe to your blog and automatically get an email whenver you make a new post? Or are they all about the RSS that email is becoming passe and there's a real world desire to phase it out, even though most people use it still and the resulting effect is an inefficiency of communication.
It's amazing that with all of this technology at our disposal, things are still complicated. It's as though the cool stuff is being made at such a feverous pace that only the folks who are exhaustedly on top of it can try to keep up and enjoy it, while the rest of the world struggles to make some practical sense out of what they're supposed to do with an XML API.
We need better solutions. We need simple answers. There is far too much information and far too little time for us to try and figure it out or find it all.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That last word is really important, and we clearly haven't delivered on the promise of the fully connected MyWeb.
Back to Jon. What's he to do? If you've got the solution, you can comment below. Or better yet, visit his blog, subscribe to it through your news reader and tell him yourself.
Scloop!
posted by Andy at
8:37 PM
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