Barbara Feldman has penned the best explanation of RSS I’ve run across. She’s an Internet entrepreneur who clearly never sleeps. She runs SurfNetKids and publishes a weekly newsletter as well as several blogs. She’s now offering her e-newsletter as an RSS feed. What does this mean? You can subscribe to her newsletter using a news aggregator. This bypasses delivery by email all together. And thus avoids the problem of spam filters blocking email messages.
You can also read about RSS in the September 2003 issue of PC World. Heck, it’ll soon be old hat…
I have seen cases being made for RSS newsletters over traditional email newsletters all over the place. What I think people are failing to see is that the majority of internet users do not know what RSS is. Using email is a chore for some people let alone explaining to them that they need to download a new application to read their favorite online newsletter.
Right now having an option for one or the other is nice, but outside of the technology content sites I can’t imagine this will take off anytime soon for the masses. As someone who develops websites I still have to consider people who are using a browser which is 5 years old. How can anyone expect someone to wrap themselves around this concept? I hate to say it but until MS Outlook includes an RSS reader in it, it won’t become a mainstream option.