You’ll notice a new badge in the recently pared-down sidebar over there. It’s about RSS Day — May 1st — a web-wide occasion designed to encourage the vast majority of us who aren’t using RSS to get with the program.
It’s easy for the rest of us, who are decidedly in the minority even now, to forget how RSS “looks” to those who haven’t taken the plunge yet. It wasn’t that long ago that I read my blogs the old fashioned way — a few years or so — so I do recall that trepidation and skepticism. Why, thought I, would I want to skip the pretty blog design and read posts in some unattractive column? If I wanted to do that, I thought, I’d pick up a newspaper.
My, how times have changed! For one, I no longer think design is the critical hallmark of success many make it out to be –it’s certainly not in the top three “Most Important Things About Your Blog That Make Me Read It Again and Again.” And for another, I could not live without Bloglines, my reader of choice.
But back in the bad old days, RSS was intimidating as hell, even for a relative techno-geek like me. It was almost impossible to visualize without actually setting up a feed and an aggregator, and viewing the feed in the aggregator — without, in short, just doing it, soup to nuts. That requires a comfort level with technology that many folks just don’t have. They want to understand what they’re getting into, and frankly, I can’t blame ‘em.
That’s one spot where those of us who’ve adopted RSS as a way of life probably haven’t done a good enough job illuminating what it’s all about to our colleagues.
Yet I’d argue RSS is essential for the busy solo. We simply cannot afford to spend time that we don’t have to spend. How much time are we really talking about, though? It’s a fair question. I estimate I save about five seconds a blog. Not much individually. But added up over the 300+ blogs in my feed, times however many days a week I keep up with them — that’s time I’d like to keep, thanks. That’s time that could be directed to publishing our own articles. (That’s not an outrageous number by the way; Scoble hits over 600.)
Much greater is the savings in “effort + attention”, or what I’ll call the mental aggravation/conservation factor. Not quite emotional in nature, definitely not measurable like time, yet still important and worth of protection, mental conservation (or its opposite, mental aggravation) is more like a feed into (or drain on) our energy. Tasks can be physically taxing, or mentally taxing, or both. Flipping through several websites, searching for the new stuff, processing it, picking the next blog and doing it all over again adds up to a mental aggravation factor that vastly outweighs the aggravation factor of learning and implementing RSS into your weblife/webwork.
So, consider this post #1 in a new series on RSS technology. Next up in post #2: “An Explanation of RSS and What It Does For the Busy Lawyer.” Post #3 will be an overview of several popular aggregators, and post #4 will explore “cutting edge” developments and uses for RSS.
And for those of you who already “get it,” mark the date on your iCal or Outlook, and plan to spread the good word!
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