Call them feeds.

Its pretty amazing that only 9% of US Employees know what RSS is. I chose to call them feeds along time ago, because I hate abbreviations that confuse users. 3 times in the past couple of weeks I have interacted with folks that are supposed to be technology leaders in their organizations and none of them knew what RSS was. In fact one lady was irritated that i asked about how they plan on using RSS in their solutions. One guy said something like, we are in enterprise stuff, not consumer stuff. That's very disturbing. RSS will initially complement email and eventually replace things like email newsletters. Most people today do not accept email from people they do not know and that's good because email is abused and misused. RSS will replace email in all scenarios where someone sends an email to more than one person. I really don't understand how so many people haven't heard of RSS or figured out how to use it in their work processes. Its like the folks who did not know what email was 5 years ago. Totally unacceptable. If your organization doesn't have a feeds policy, you should be scared and I can only say that like blogging, if your boss doesn't groke RSS, you might want to look around for another job, because there is a high chance that one of your competitors is going to eat your lunch soon.

Technology changes and is constantly changing, You need to continuously revamp your work processes to include the new capabilities that are made available by new technologies. That's not an option, you have to. If you don't consume feeds voraciously then you information consumption must be intensely inefficient.

So last month I challenged mom on the question, “What’s RSS?” and hilarity ensued.  I was pretty sure that most of the world has no clue on the topic, despite reading…

• Some bloggers steal content over RSS (wow, why bother? I mean, why wouldn’t you give attribution?)
• Phil Hollows (who?) is lecturing on “growing your audience” and RSS is a key part of his topic
• Rok Hrastnik (who?) has a TWO-part series on “using RSS to increase your traffic” (1 and 2)
• Kim Roach (who?) writes about integrating RSS into marketing campaigns
• Bill Flitter (who? oh, the CEO of Pheedo.  who?) has several tips for marketing with RSS

Well, it turns out some folks did some of that there newfangled research on the topic.  Here’s what they found:

2%. Two. 0010.

Ready for the next ’sound-bite’?

So my complaints about Attensa (which may be outdated at this point)?  Moot.  New mobile phone RSS readers? Eh, not so interested.

When Kim Roach writes

RSS is changing the way we consume information online … RSS is turning into one of the most popular distribution channels for webmasters, publishers, article writers and news syndicators … With over 100 RSS and blog search engines available online, it’s time that you started integrating RSS into your marketing mix.

Source: Dead2.0 » Re: What’s RSS? I told you so!