[epub] Re: RSS is DEAD - Long Live eMail!!!

[Ross Hall <ross.hall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 02:25 PM, Janet Roberts wrote:
> 2. Will RSS kill email publishing?

Funnily enough I seem to remember a feature in Explorer on my Mac where 
I could subscribe to a website. The browser then checked these 
subscribed sites each time it started and told me if one had been 
updated.

Quite a useful feature at first, but then I realised it was creating an 
information management problem. I live in eMail land. Clients eMail me 
with their needs, updates, reports, and I maintain contact with them 
the same way. My inbox is carefully managed to filter out junk and put 
what I need to see right there in front of me. To have to remember to 
go somewhere else and check another feed was an annoyance, a habit that 
was quickly broken.

I've noticed a similar trend amongst others I work with. After eMail is 
introduced a culture seems to emerge where if it isn't in the inbox it 
doesn't exist. And this is perhaps where problems with junk mail come 
from.

After I activated spam filtering on my mail client I found myself 
checking my junk mail as often as I checked my inbox to see if 
something had slipped through. A couple of times it had. So I adjusted 
my behaviour. Two personal accounts get the delete key treatment, 
another I've changed my behaviour to check the junk subjects and 
senders no more than once a week.

I'm getting back in control of my digital life.

So will RSS catch on? For a very short while. And then it will fade, 
just as subscriptions, tickers and all the other features that were 
supposed to push information at us.

Play with it if you wish. Have a go, an experiment. But don't spend too 
much time and money worrying about it. The bigger issue is not whether 
to add another technology to your list of formats, but rather how to 
engage with people so they don't turn off in the first place!


Ross ;-))

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