Dave Winer recently wrote in his blog something about the need to keep RSS working properly, sorry, I forgot the exact context. From a communicators POV there is of course this other issue…
A person very dear to me has been following my blogging efforts pretty closely: She reads my blogs and a blog of friends of hours in bloglines and has even started her own blog. Last week we were sitting on the couch and she asked me, "what exactly is RSS". I was a bit perplex at first but then it dawned on me that she is/was one of them:
Currently at least 75 million consumers and businesspeople in the USA and UK use RSS on a regular basis. However, depending on which study’s stats you believe, only 17-32% of RSS users actually know they’re using RSS.
That’s right — roughly 50 million regular RSS users would say, Huh? if you asked them what RSS was…
I explained it with the pizza example and she kind of knew it already. But obviously the connection to the word or concept RSS was not there.
It shows though, most likely, the majority of internet users won’t need/use the word RSS at all. It’ll be "subscribe" or "unsubscribe, no matter whatchacallit.
Technorati Tags: rss, syndication, subscribe
3 Comments
Christiane
Very kind of you to keep my name out of this – kind of embarassing, but hey, for what it’s worth: I know many more examples for technical vocabulary relating to blogs and wikis which are pretty superfluous, since they denote something that simply doesn’t need a new name. So please: Think about it before you come up with new fancy terms – simple is good if you want to reach people like me, you know ;-).
Sebastian
I’ll tell Dave Winer personally…:-)
Dave Winer
Got it.