Comments on: How to Boost Your Feed Readers

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:04:37 +0000

Great idea Wayne, I’m designing the branded buttons and banners right now…watch this space.

By: Wayne Smallman

Wayne Smallman — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:26:09 +0000

OK, here’s the fix: David, I think you ought to start a petition for an RSS Day, build some education and inform people of the benefits.

RSS is a rising star these days, what with Yahoo! Pipes doing funky stuff with feeds, so there’s still room for growth.

But the thing is, if you’re using an up-to-date browser, you don’t even need to know what RSS means.

With the likes of Firefox, feeds from websites and ‘blogs are discovered automatically…

By: Hsien Lei

Hsien Lei — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:06:54 +0000

There’s no perfect way. Most of my friends and family visit sites directly. My husband, who’s generally pretty up on things, asked me just last week what RSS meant!

By: Wayne Smallman

Wayne Smallman — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:41:22 +0000

Email is good as an option, but not as a default.

Thinking things through, it means that the process gets broken, or at least interrupted.

Which means there’s a better than average chance the recipient just won’t follow the CTA (Call To Action) up.

Not the ideal scenario…

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 09:32:59 +0000

Hsien, I think you’re right, but the big disadvantage of the mailing list option is that it is the kind of missive that will easily get caught up in spam filters. But, point taken!

By: Hsien Lei

Hsien Lei — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 08:01:12 +0000

I think the better alternative is the email option because people who don’t understand RSS are probably less likely to even use an aggregator like Google Reader or My Yahoo.

By: Wayne Smallman

Wayne Smallman — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:01:23 +0000

I think it’s a valid point because you can never assume too much about the tech’ savviness of the people traipsing around your website.

I certainly wouldn’t be offended by seeing such a thing.

I might even try it myself…

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 17:44:30 +0000

As an additional thought for boosting one’s feed readers, never forget the email option. You may only vaguely remember mailing lists…those newsletters that arrived plumb in your inbox on a regular basis before the days of blogs, rss, rdf, atom, wikis, wakis, waikikis etc.

It is always worth providing the option. There are still a good number of people who might have an invaluable contribution to make who would instantly sign up for an email “feed” but might still be reluctant to added your rss to their aggregator.

And, of course, there are those people who haven’t yet been turned on to rss at all…let alone wakiwikis. (Which is where the “What is RSS?” tag comes into its own).

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:58:59 +0000

Yep, I always had a page on Sciencebase explaining what RSS is, but never really put the icon and the explanation together in a coherent way. With Sciencetext, I’m experimenting with a “What is RSS?” tag as part of the icon itself, see above left. That leads straight to the feed, but hopefully the majority of users are going to see something sensible either courtesy of their browser or Feedburner…numbers are up by about 15% since yesterday but that might just be a blip, I’ll give it a week to have a real impact and if it doesn’t I’ll point the phrase to a proper expo page.

By: Robert Irizarry

Robert Irizarry — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 16:51:37 +0000

I think adding a “What is RSS?” link is a great idea. My blog isn’t technology related so this has a great deal of potential for growing RSS subscribers.