Open-Node.net

I’m not talking about work - God knows I work enough already… it’s going to be another 55+ hour week for me. Yay. I’m talking about all the time I used to spend reading articles on the web. I can remember spending hours at a time, every day, going through a list of websites that I used to frequent, just looking for some cool stuff to read. And now… I don’t. Now, I have more time to… well… work, frankly. And RSS is to blame.

RSS, assuming you’ve been living in a cave without internet access (many of them are wired these days…), is an XML-based document format which helps websites syndicate their content. If a website has an RSS feed, tools called Aggregators can ???subscribe??? to the feed and automatically pull down the new content. I’ve got my aggregator (SharpReader - it totally rocks!) set to poll the sites I frequent every 5 minutes, so I know when a new story is released. If I find the text in the title or the preview snippet compelling, I can visit the website and read the rest of the article. If not, meh. I ignore it.

It amazes me how many sites actually use RSS. Slashdot, ActiveWin, Bink, BigBlackGlasses, LonghornBlogs, Open-node… even Microsoft’s MSDN is using RSS to communicate when new articles are released. How friggin’ cool is that?

So, what’s the next step? Well - it depends on who you are. It’s easy to get hooked on RSS feeds. I barely even visit websites anymore, if they have an RSS feed. In fact, I think I can blame RSS for credit RSS with an order of magnitude increase in my productivity. What an amazing tool! Now, as a website owner, I can see that the power of RSS is amazing. If I want my stuff to be read by other people, the best thing to do in syndicate it, right? Yup - that’s what I think. But what if I want people to come to my website?

Why would people come visit my site if they can run an aggregator in their system tray (or in their sidebar, perhaps ::Dr. Evil pinky-to-corner-of-mouth pose::), why the hell would people even bother coming to my site? Excellent question. RSS, in a way, is a hit-killer. Granted, you still get hits - your RSS feed will get hit an amazing amount, but the rest of your site might not. What if you have a great deal of content that can’t be expressed in RSS, like Flash? The truth is - the site has to be worth coming to (and yes, I know my site isn’t). If you’ve got content that people want, they’ll come to your site.

That, to an extent, is the way it’s always been with the web. The most hits BigBlackGlasses ever got on a single day was something like 5 up until the release of the Blaster worm. The day the worm hit, I posted removal instructions, with the help of some other Microsoft MVPs, and the site jumped to over 160 simultaneous users at one time. Total hits were much higher than that. I’m sure that doesn’t sound like a whole lot to most people (LonghornBlogs got over 7000 unique hits in it’s first week - yowza!), but I was quite proud of it.

Essentially, it all boils down to this: The rules haven’t changed - they’re just being enforced. Syndicate your content, and more people have a likelyhood of reading it. Fill your site with content that’s not available through syndication if you want people to actually come and explore it.

RSS makes casual browsing obsolete. Give ‘em something to look forward to.

Good… well that took up a whole bunch of that ???spare time??? junk I had… now what? I wonder if Simple Life is still on…

• Really Simple?
• Protect Yourself Online. Privacy
• What the hell is wrong with you people?
• Metart Liza
• Allmusic.com

January 03rd 2004 Posted to   Just Test