Happy RSS Awareness Day!
Posted on April 30th, 2008 by Eric Murphy
May 1st is a festive day where you sing the praises of your favorite RSS feed reader and send gifts of
highly interesting RSS feeds to all your family, friends and co-workers. (OK maybe that’s just how I’m going to spend the day.) Actually RSS Awareness Day has been started by a group of people trying to… er… raise awareness about RSS. It may not be as much fun as say ‘ Talk Like A Pirate Day’, but I still think it’s important.
The numbers on how many folks out there currently using RSS feeds vary , but most cite reports such as this one published by Yahoo in 2005. Everyone agrees that the number is much lower that it should be, and the underlying cause is simple awareness. To quote from the Yahoo paper “The real story, however, is the much larger population of “Unaware RSS users” who consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN). 27% of online users consume third-party content on these pages without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.”
It works, it’s Really Simple (hence the name) and it saves countless hours of web searching. Not to mention being able to get rid of e-mail alerts. I for one have enough messages to wade through without signing up for more. So why aren’t more people using RSS? Plenty of bloggers talk about it, even those in the relatively small world of industrial automation blogs. I know Jim Cahill , Gary Mintchell and others both tout the benefits of RSS. Personally I think that people are continually overwhelmed by new technology and don’t have the time (or at least don’t think they have the time) to learn about it and get around to using it. At some levels OPC faces the same challenges. Many times I’ve heard statements like, ‘Yeah we’ve heard of OPC but just haven’t got the opportunity to really explore how it could help us”. Yet probably a good number of these same folks are using OPC somewhere in their industrial applications and aren’t aware of it.
Who of you out there are using RSS? If so, how? Simply as a web/news aggregator or are there those using RSS as a feature in some Industrial Automation application?
May 1st, 2008 at 7:38 am
Eric, Thanks for pointing this out! It’s odd that RSS has not gone totally mainstream, at least in our automation industry. I think much of it has to do with conservative IT organizations who still have their folks on IE6 browsers and Office 2003. Adding RSS feeds is hard work in this environment.
If your readers find themselves in this spot, they might try going to NewsGator.com and adding the RSS reader for Outlook (http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NewsGatorInbox/Default.aspx). This is of course if they have administrative access to their PCs to install. Otherwise, Google Reader is a great web-based way to read feeds.
I have an OPML file (collection of RSS feeds for importing) on the right side bar of Emerson Process Experts if anyone needs a jump start for RSS feeds from automation and industry blogs and news feeds.
Take it easy,
Jim
May 1st, 2008 at 8:45 am
In our own effort to raise the awareness of RSS, PTO published an RSS Primer in our most recent PROFInews North American Edition: http://us.profibus.com/newsletters/newsletter_19/Issue19_RSS.htm. I also included my list of RSS feeds for import into your favorite reader.
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Jim, Carl
Thanks for the comments and support of RSS! And thanks for the OPML files, I’ve found a few feeds I wasn’t using before.