So rss feeds have been around for a long time, i remember back in 1999 adding them to metaevents / protest.net. They were cool. Today after much infighting, we have lots of kinds of rss/atom feeds. I use it everyday to read news via bloglines, and to keep sites i help run working including indymedia, indyblogs, anarchoblogs, protest.net, and odeo. So rss matters a lot to me.
Podcasting is another area i’ve been involved with lately. So it’s interesting to see how people understand and relate to the two. Podcasting is new, rss/atom feeds are old.
In a recent Nielsen/ study (via) found that %11 of blog readers use rss, and %66 don’t even know what it is! In another study \x0APew study on knowledge of internet terms it was found that %9 of americans knew what the term rss meant. The one interesting thing is %13 said they knew what podcasting is.
There isn’t a great difference between %9 and %13 percent, just outside the %3 margin of error. But rss has been around for 6 or 7 years, while podcasting is about a year old.
Why is podcasting better known? I’d say a lot has to do with the name. It’s an easy term, it’s catchy. It plays of the cache of apple’s huge ipod marketing campaign. It doesn’t feel as geeky. No acronyms here. Just something which is easy to remember. People can guess at it’s meaning. Now it’s not a perfectly correct name, as it’s neither broadcasting in a strict sense, nor just for ipods. But it’s good because it’s approachable, rememberable, and has ‘meaning’ without a definition.
If both atom and rss just dropped those names and adopted feed, then it would be possible for recognition of the format / concept to grow.
Names matter. I know it seems silly, but it’s important to hook in to people’s mental landscape.
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