Dave Winer: how RSS can break through

80 percent of who?

Come on, man -- how many people use the web, and how many people use RSS.

On your flight home, walk up and down the aisle with a notebook and ask people if they use RSS, and tell us what the number is. And even that is not representative, people who travel by air between Europe and North America are not your average web users.

Did you take any stats courses in college Scoble? If not, we need to have a talk, asap. ";->"

And I said "bust" through, not "break" through.

And if Dare-O is tuned in, this is part of what really happened when I visited in April 2005. I told them over and over that they weren't going far enough.

when 80% of the hands go up when you ask the people in the local supermarket, then it will have broken through

These hand raising stats you always quote about how mainstream RSS is are highly inaccurate. Please stop.

RSS is still not mainstream and the average person is still not aware of it.

I certainly don't think RSS has "broken through" yet - what you're doing rocks, Scoble, but you're not objective on this point. :) I also haven't had time to look at what Dave or IE7 or other software have done lately with RSS. My main use of RSS is to add feeds and see posting titles on my home page, and when they interest me, click and read. I submit to you that that level of usage is a lot more main-stream-realistic than the edge cases of RSSphiles who have 100 feeds in their Blog reader software - particularly over time. Are those edge cases really going to be reading 100 feeds a day next year, and the year after. The home page headline usage has potential as a mainstream user scenario - which is what is really required for RSS to break throught - but the whole experience of finding, selecting, and adding a feed to my home page needs to be a lot easier to do before it will be a mainstream scenario - especially finding. Another scenario which would, I think, break it into the mainstream is for an automated post aggregator which works like news.google.com. It bypasses focus on particular blogs (news outlets) and instead focuses on specific topics-of-interest. RSS is not what I'm working on right now - we shipped a VS.NET aggregator almost a year ago and moved on to other things since - so perhaps some of you are already working on these scenarios, or have examples to point us too. I'd like to see them. I do think the browser integration idea is fairly obvious and could be good, so I will find some time to look at IE7. Anyone know of FireFox work in this area?

My roommate graduated 3 years ago as a computer engineer. He's worked at two tech companies including IBM. He's a typical computer geek that likes building his own computers and makes websites on the side. He doesn't even know what RSS is.

Jon did you read my piece? I tried to explain how the neophyte user can and will get 100 feeds without having to subscribe to 100 feeds. Maybe I need to say it more directly.

Maneesh, I find that when I tell people on airplanes that I blog, most of them don't know what I'm talking about even though the word is mentioned several times in every TV news broadcast these days. And RSS, as far as I know has never been talked about in mainstream broadcast news, and rarely in print.

My last point is challenging enough to all of us as RSS publishers, as well as all of us as RSS consumers, that I feel like I need to emphasize it. I think mainstream users are going to be a lot more interested in topics-of-interest than in feeds-of-interest. No, that's not a good thing for feed branding or for blogger branding. But is it true? And what do we do about it, as the technologists who will make it happen, and as publishers who RSS, and as consumers who might like that way of using/finding interesting RSS content?

I did read it, Dave, and I certainly like your emphases on easy and on centralized. I guess I'm just wanting us all to push past the concept of feeds as being the focus of user interest, to the concept of post/news topics as being the focus of user interest.

Jon, I'm not talking about section 2, I'm talking about section 1.

Reading lists can be useful also for the expert/RSSphiles, if nothing else, for discovering starting points for specific subjects (away from thier ususal interests).

I think Fred Wildon's, that RSS could improve on a lot of what is currently done via email is spot on. "RSS has to become brain-dead simple to use." Certainly. I do think we can consider RSS (as an umbrella term) adopted, though it hasn't really filtered through to the general public yet.

Dave's first point, "It must be easy to find relevant feeds" is reasonable. But the answer does most definitely *not* lie with centralised subscription.

The web is a distributed system, centralisation runs counter to its healthy development. Web, no, *Internet* 101. I'm actually a little surprised at the suggestion - the primary benefit of what Dave calls reading lists is that the subscription data is on the web, accessible over http, file export/import not required. Pushing such data into a centralised silo undermines those benefits.

I have to agree with most of the comments here, RSS is not mainstream, most people haven't heard of it let alone used it. Most people wouldn't actually care about RSS itself.

Once its in the browsers and they can subscribe to blogs and feeds easily, then it may catch on, but they still won't know what RSS is, or need to!

instead of a poll at a tech conference on who knows about rss (it's reasonable to expect the attendees to index high for rss awareness) - it might be interesting to ask: who knows of...

...an easy way for people to add the things they want to read about on a regular basis, to a familiar interface (web pages)?

...an easy way for publishers and editors to provide high quality lists of things their audience wants (reading lists on web pages)?

or perhaps ask how they think something like this would work, look, etc..?

The other 20 per cent? Just ask him.

PS. Your browser might pass the info that you want to subscribe to feedX to Yahoo! or whoever. But we have protocols that could automatically ensure the copy at MSN, Bloglines, FeedDemon or wherever remains in sync.

The easiest way to implement this would be simple polling, *exactly* like RSS reading, though that would imply per-user choice of master service. But smarter ways for distributed maintenance of subscription lists are available through WebDAV, Atom protocol, RDF diff/patch or for that matter MS's Simple Sharing Extensions.

I know I'll be labeled as "elitist" for saying this. Believe me, I am not.

Yes, I know the 80% is a skewed number, it's 80% of the web-savy, blogger, conference-goer geeky minority who were in the 21st century long before the rest of us:-)

But let's be real and ask ourselves of the purpose of our commnication. More often than not we don't want to address the entire population of Planet Earth:-) More often than not we have a target audience ... and chances are in many cases that target will be the innovator crowd, in which case 80% is not that bad.

OK, you can throw stones now :-)

Damn, I forgot to CoComment this :-(

you know Scoble...I introduced a friend of mine to RSS and web-based aggregators...the REASON i think RSS hasn't taken off is because it's a pain in the ass to subscribe to feeds...

I used Windows Live as a basis for my friend and it took me a hell lot of pain just to help him subscribe to some important feeds for him...try it yourself...

this is more like a critique on Windows Live...please ask these guys to make all of this simpler...add content is useless in some ways and if you have more than 20 subscribed feeds, the interface just becomes clunky and hard to navigate...

btw, i still managed to start him off on Windows Live ;)

I think with RSS integrated in IE7 (I gather they will be called just 'feeds', whatever) it will finally reach the sheep when they go through their upgrade cycle.

Until then its a fringe thing, like, well, blogging.
So once again you are an edge case ;)

I think Dave totally misses the point. Look at the total number of computers in use, and then the total number of computers on the Internet. Sure, those numbers are very fuzzy, but they are solid enough to show that Net usage is still a minority activity. I've noticed that people in the technology industries tend to greatly over-estimate the deployment of the fruits of their labor even throughout the US. The neat stuff Silicon Valley and San Francisco saw five years ago is just now becoming popular elsewhere.

Given that "break" in technology adoption, I'd say there's another one even among Internet users. Those who perceive a need for the types of services being offered via RSS have found RSS. The rest have lives outside the Net, and chiefly use it for email and maybe pay bills. They'd say they have no interest in RSS.

Dave, you'd starve trying to find Macs throughout the South also. They do exist, but are quite rare.

Even the idea that “RSS” will be known to the general public baffles me. I don’t think you will “ever” be able to get a real hands up on who knows what RSS is or who uses it. It’s not a product ! This is like asking anyone that uses a computer their definition of TPC/IP. It’s just never going to happen.

A mainstream user cares only about the results, not the underlying format of those results. As much as we would like otherwise RSS is a format. It’s not viewed as xml in all it’s glory. I would think the question will be, do you know what news’s feed’s are. Of course this is talking about a general none technical consumer.

Sure a web site admin/creator or a hard core blogger will know, but that’s as far as it will ever get until allot more time passes, or more implementations take shape.

What are we doing useful with RSS besides syndication of news ?

I don’t see an application/standard that takes all hardware/vendor driver/software update feeds and updates your computer when updates are available. Why aren’t these people using it for deployment or patches/upgrades etc.. Fit’s quite nicely. The future of RSS is large we all see that. However it need’s different implementations and uses. Ton’s of stuff can be done with it, not just blog/comments/news stuff. Until we see these different implementations come out, I can’t see that happening.

We tend to hide the implementation details to give a consumer what they want. Information.

My my what a treat. Ringside seat, watching techies try and market and actually launch something mainstream, all infighting fiddling while Rome burns. Pssst, the Emperor hath no clothes.

Wow, a lot of talk about stats, if you were to google RSS you get about 1,200,000,000 results. This number is in itself significant. To understand what 80% of anything is you would have to count a cross section of everybody that would be capable of using RSS, this would require at least access to a computer with internet connection and an ability to read and write. In the long run, blogging will be theworld uniting force that is avaiable to more people than television.

Man, I wish I could do this with CoComment

RSS was around before podcasting, but people are talking more about podcasting than RSS. The main stream media have picked up on podcasting as they see value in it. (most) people still don't get the value of RSS. And until people get (or more likely are shown) the value of RSS, it'll never get beyond a technology used by informed 20%.

RSS as a concept (er, "web feeds") busted through to the mainstream many many years ago with PointCast, when grandmas and secretaries "got it" and knew how to use it. RSS as a technology, albeit it very simple, is downright pathetic. Where is threaded comment support? Where is trackback chaining? RSS has the opportunity to make the Semantic Web digestable for every day users like grandma, but it just too bad that elitist geeks and greedy corporations try to keep it on top of some pedastal. RSS ain't going nowhere until it combines the best of e-mail, forums, newsgroups, and blogs!

Dave's right. The question is "80 percent of who?"

And, the followup question is "Who is Who?"

Is "Who" everybody? Every web user? Every blogger?

Depends, doesn't it, on your own objectives?

Anyone who shows up at the same conference -- or reads the same blogs -- as Winer or Scoble has already sliced themselves off from the rest of humanity.

Remember these two things:

1. People who aren't interested in technology don't pay atention to technology.

2. People who aren't interested in technology use technology when it makes it easier to do something they want to do. They still don't care about technology.

I'm with Fred on this, but I'll change his comment slightly. When 80% of the hands go up at a supermarket in Peoria, Illinois, then RSS will have broken through.

A couple of weeks ago I released a free blogging client called Bleezer (www.bleezer.com). Last week the local newspaper interviewed me and did a third of a page story on how I was making blogging easier.

The most frequent question I've gotten since then?

"So what is a blog exactly?"

RSS is the furthest thing from those people's minds. Oh, did I mention I live in Waterloo, Canada, home of the RIM BlackBerry. So it isn't as if these people don't know technology.

By the way, if you think that RSS feeds are hard to subscribe to you haven't used NetNewsWire on the Mac. If I click on a feed in Firefox, NetNewsWire pops up asking me if I want to subscribe.

I have to agree that RSS is not something that's widespread. At least not as much as the RSS crowd would like. I'm a software developer, and even in this crowd RSS is not something that's widely used. Some people have heard of it, quite a few not, and only very few use it. And this is between software developers. At least that's been my experience by what I've seen in a couple of companies.

Most people still go to the web browser, visit a known site, or get to a location via Google (or some other friendly global search company). Whereas for myself my starting point for all my browsing is my RSS aggregator.

Maybe when you're hanging out with the crowd "in the RSS know", as Robert seems to be, then you'd get 80% of people raising their hands. But for others, like mom and pop, and regular Joe Blogs (pun intended) out there, they have no idea about RSS.

An easy and unbiquitous 1-2 click process resident in the browser would do wonders for making RSS more accessible.

Most newreaders aren't that good. Most people don't know what the orange XML is or any of the other icons or "subscribe" (email?).

Lately I've had good luck with Bloglines + the litle bookmarklet they offer to save feeds.

Now when I am on a blog I like, I just click the bookmark in the horizontal link bar at the top of my browser and it subscribes me. I don't even go looking for icons or subscribe links.

A standard, quick 1-2 step process like this would entice more RSS subscriptions and participation.

I was at LIFT06. I can assure you folks that it was far from being a bloggers conference, just check how many of the 350 folks there have created a blog entry! It was mainly, in my opinion, post-graduates and other folks in there late twenties from a diverse range of universities. So I was surprised at the numbers who put there hands up when Robert asked the question. CoComment seems really cool!

[at lift as well] and yes geoff, there was also a significant portion maybe didn't want to admit that had no idea about RSS until earlier that day? i mean you don't want look dumb at a geek(ish) conference.

That said, scoble in his speech made a passionate case as to why we're all crazy not to be using it more exhaustively in our lives. I believe that will come. but there is a huuuge gap between the alpha geeks and the rest of world on this one. first thing first, we need to lose the acronym "RSS". acronyms and screenfull of xml are pretty good way to terrify joe/jane average user. RSS will take off once everyone can use RSS without even *realizing* that they are using it.