The widespread adoption of RSS – Really Simple Syndication – was a turning point for accessing information on the web. Instead of constantly visiting key sites throughout the day to keep up with information, people could simply subscribe to everything being published on those sites, and then use whatever software they wanted to to aggregate and read it.
It was, effectively, the first content “mash-up” technology available on the web…
RSS has been a real game-changer for anyone that regularly consumes web based information. It’s shifted the process of collecting content from a manual to an automated one, and has made it easy for people to follow hundreds of sites that could be publishing content of interest to them. Equally important, adoption of RSS by publishers has taken off, with most major news organization, blogs, and local publications now supporting it. Widespread adoption by all parties has brought it to critical mass, making the benefits offered by RSS really compelling.
But there are also some downsides that come along with that…
As an essentially frictionless process, RSS has made it easy for people to find themselves receiving far more information than they can possibly consume. It isn’t uncommon for people to receive many thousands of updates a day, with only a few dozen being relevant or interesting. The work that they previously had to invest in visiting sites to access content has now shifted to the task of sorting through the content that they keep receiving automatically. And that can be a much harder task.
The other challenge most people face with RSS is keeping on top of what sites they should be subscribing to. There are millions of RSS enabled sites available covering just about every topic imaginable. It isn’t easy for folks to know what new sites they should be adding and – perhaps more importantly – which existing ones they should drop. My experience is that people tend to add most of the of sites they end up following when they first start using an RSS reader, and then stop paying much attention to it as time goes by. Because of that, they end up missing out on a lot of great new content.
That said, I believe there is a way to overcome these limitations and really maximize the potential of RSS. The key is to leverage the interests, insights, breadth, experience of my social network, and effectively ‘crowd source’ editorial control to them to create unique and relevant topical feeds.
I call this process Social Syndication.
A great platform for social syndication is Twitter. As a community, Twitter users can publish short (140 character) updates on any topic they want, and they can subscribe to the updates of any other members they want to follow. What makes this so powerful for social syndication is that these updates (called ‘Tweets’) can contain links to other content, and can also be tagged with searchable keywords (called “HashTags”). Combined, these capabilities can effectively create ‘virtual feeds’ on any specific topic.
The process is fairly straight forward. Twitter users can search for Tweets on a topic using HashTags, keywords, and a fairly detailed set of additional criteria. They can also limit the results they get to only those tweets that include links, returning posts that tend to be more news/editorial in nature. When they are happy with the search, a single click from the results page turns it in to a standard RSS feed. I put together this short video to demonstrate how it works:
While the results from the specific search I set up in this video would probably be too broad for most people to deal with, the process used does highlight the unique nature of this approach. Where the traditional model for RSS makes you subscribe to feeds on specific sites, social syndication lets you subscribe to the collective feedback of specific trusted people in your social network with an interest and knowledge of a subject. Because people will only Tweet topical links they believe are unique or interesting, social syndication on Twitter will usually deliver highly relevant and focused updates. And unlike the ‘single editorial voice’ that’s delivered through feeds from more traditional media sources, the conversational nature of Twitter will typically generate links reflecting a multitude well considered perspectives.
Another similar way to leverage social syndication is to create feeds based on links posted by specific individuals that you view as experts in particular subjects. These types of feeds are an ideal way to stay current on more cutting edge topics without having to deal with too much off topic noise.
I recognize that Twitter isn’t the only platform that can power social syndication, but I think it is far and away the best one to leverage for the job. It has one of the largest active (and very interactive) communities around, and is built on top of a truly open publishing platform. It also enjoys great third party support with a healthy development ecosystem forming around it. And most importantly, it’s run by people who really understand the potential of the platform they’ve built.
Using a social syndication model, you will enjoy a far larger surface area of discovery than you could ever realize with a more traditional feed model.
It’s the next stage in the evolution of RSS…
I plan on a more in depth look at Twitter, RSS and Social Syndication in a new installment of Practical RSS. Keep an eye out for it!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Social Syndication is so cutting edge that it’s almost invisible. Ping.fm, OnlyWire.com, and Pixelpush.com seem to be the most relevant out of this category – with Ping.fm being in the lead due to a Wordpress plug-in. (Onlywire can get you banned if you promote your own stuff too much and Pixelpush has no such plug-in that I’ve found.)
So when you blog (via any WordPress blog), Ping.fm can take your content and spread it around to 30 different sites, including Twitter, and the rest.
As these social sites have to be joined and subscribed/friended, this doesn’t take the Main Stream media “broadcast” model – because you have to give worth to get subscribers. But it does change the model substantially. (As if newspapers and magazines weren’t already seeing their model change…)
Where social aggregators have become more and more common place after the success of Friendfeed, it’s just a matter of time before they also become social syndicators so that all your content is available through the bulk of your social networks.
And these three probably are due for a review on as a subject of their own.
Robert,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Content no longer takes a linear path from creation to consumption – what we think of as the tradition media model. Instead, the hard lines that existed between publication and consumption have blurred, with everyone playing both roles simultaneous. The resulting flood of content has brought it own share of challenges. As you point out, it has also clearly had an impact on the commercial structure of traditional content based markets like the news industry.
This is an area I definitely plan on exploring here in more depth. I appreciate you taking the time to read this blog and share your thoughts.
-john