Yesterday we (Rogier, Lilia and myself) about RSS, notification and aggregation. The subtitle was "Doing smart things with stupid meta data". Lilia wrote down some notes about our presentation. A lot of questions came, like (quote from Lilia's post):
Questions people askedWhat's in it for me?
Why is it better than existing ways of distributing/aggregating data?
How many feeds are there? Where do I find them? What if a website doesn't have an RSS feed?
How comes that it is supposed to reduce information overload if it looks like increasing it?
I remember another question: What is the impact of RSS? (Sounds a bit like: Why are you so enthousiastic?) For me, the impact is in the efficiency of not having to visit a lot of sites, but getting new contributions (not only to weblogs, but also journal papers and 'ordinary' news) in one glance.
I also found out that it's better to show it to people than tell. After the presentation, several colleagues came to my room who wanted to try Bloglines, one of the RSS-readers we showed.
Our collegues mostly are not weblog readers (nor writers), so demonstrating Bloglines was perhaps not a good choice, because it suggests that you need to read weblogs. I hope we showed that RSS has more use than only weblog reading.
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