RSS (or rather, content syndication in general) has two broad uses: {a} the syndication of one site's content by another site and {b} the aggregation of personally selected content by individual users. If you're curious about the latter, a new roundtable discussion with five leading developers of RSS aggregators offers loads of insight.
It's published at DrunkenBlog, and is entitled "RSS for Mac OS X Roundtable." But never fear! Don't be put off by the Mac emphasis in the title (or the first question, which addresses differences between the development environments for RSS in Windows and OS X): the discussion is really about the future of RSS and aggregator client software. Because of the free- and shareware developers' close connections with their users, this roundtable gives valuable insight into site users' (that is, readers') practices, I think.
Of particular interest is the developers' thoughts about the relationship of RSS feeds and site traffic. Thankfully, we in InterVarsity never needed to worry about losing advertising revenue; but even for us they have reassuring things to say about the positive relationship between RSS readers and traffic growth.
This matches perfectly with my own experience. Now that I'm aggregating such sources as Slashdot, NPR, A List Apart, and (dare I say it) the InterVarsity homepage — and getting a nifty little alert in my Dock about new content — I'm visiting each of these sites way more than I used to. In short: RSS feeds tease site content even before a reader visits. That allows good content to drive traffic — the best strategy of all.
(Also of interest to me is the "roundtable" genre. It appears that the DrunkenBlog guy put together a set of questions, probably emailed them out to a set of developers, asked for their responses, then edited them into this interesting format. I think we might explore this approach for some content at InterVarsity sites....)
Posted by Jon on October 19, 2004 12:19 PM