Last week, I argued that “RSS Needs an Easy Button,” the point of which was mainly to demonstrate that mainstream Web sites are doing a poor job of explaining the benefits of RSS to ordinary users. However, another big piece of getting more Web users taking advantage of RSS is explaining it in “plain English” to people – either visually or in person. The video below, “RSS in Plain English” attempts to do just that:
Why might you want to spread the word about RSS? Well, if you’re a blogger – or, a producer of any form of online media – it’s a way to make your brand “sticky” with new users versus depending on them to bookmark your web site and come back at some point in the future (i.e. - your content is in their RSS feed every day). If you’re an employee in an organization that depends on keeping up-to-date with the latest news, evangelizing RSS can save everyone a lot of time. And if you’re neither of the above, at least you’ll be supporting the growth of a technology that is crucial to many of the services you depend on every day (including Mashable!).
So, how do you explain RSS to a novice? Personally, I explain it by demonstrating how it allows you to read all of the sites you typically visit in one place, hence, saving you considerable time that would otherwise be spent navigating the Web. If this doesn’t resonate, I like to make the analogy to old-fashioned newspapers, which are often a round-up of stories from the wire services like AP and Reuters, blended in with content produced by the paper’s own reporters. It’s not a great analogy, but it at least conveys the idea of reading content from multiple sources in the same place.