IP Democracy: K.I.S.S. My RSS

Credit for the title of this post goes to Scott Karp, who closed his own Publishing 2.0 post with it yesterday. Not only a fun play on words, the phrase summarizes Scott’s critique of RSS and his suggestions for moving it in the direction of a mass market publishing tool.

Scott’s first two suggestions struck me as good, common sense ideas that would be relatively simple to implement and could help bridge the cultural gap between what he calls the “technoweebosphere” and the traditional media world. The third seems more challenging and, as Scott suggests, may be the arena that yields “the real killer app for RSS.”

Scott’s first suggestion for “fixing” RSS is to start referring to “subscribing,” which everyone understands, and stop talking about “syndication,” “XML” and “feed.” The simple and clear message to people, he says, should be “[s]ubscribe by email, or subscribe with a ‘reader.’”

That leads to Scott’s second point—since everyone’s got email, the next step is to encourage everyone to get a reader.

Every site with an RSS feed should have a BIG link inviting people to “Get a reader,” because most people either don’t have one or don’t know that they have one. What’s a reader for? To read stuff from this site along with stuff from other sites, all in one place.

The final step, says Scott is to “use the iTunes model—Search browse, recommend, remix.” He notes that “Google Reader has the search part down,” that “Yahoo at least takes a stab at browsing and recommending” and that “an Amazon-esque ‘people who subscribed to this also subscribed to…’” would be “[b]etter than ‘most popular.’”

But quoting Paul Kedrosky that “people are lazy,” Scott suggests that these tools may not be enough to build a bridge from Media 1.0 to Media 2.0. “The real killer app for RSS,” he says “is the pre-packaged remix…Whoever gets really good at putting together content mixes will have overloaded, overburdened media consumers flocking to their door.”

Here’s the real problem - RSS feeds are still static media, just in a different package. The New Media revolution will come when content is completely atomized and fully tagged, so that it can be remixed into perfectly tailored packages to suit every taste, i.e. truly what I want (when I want it).

But remember - PEOPLE ARE LAZY. They don’t have the time to put these packages together themselves. The real competition in New Media will be among content remixers. We used to call these editors — the only difference is that remixers will have a nearly infinite diversity of content at their disposal.

Since Scott has at least one foot in the Media 1.0 world (he’s Managing Director of Research and Strategy for Atlantic Media), he’s well aware that the bridge from that world to the promised land of Media 2.0 has not yet been fully built. And while his post suggests there’s a lot of money to be made by those who can create Media 2.0 “editors” that extend the bridge to the other shore, he’s also appropriately adamant in his advice to “keep it simple.” I’d bet that bridge-builders (and publishers) who keep his advice in mind will serve themselves (and their investors) well.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on January 21, 2006 12:08 PM to IP Democracy