RSS For The Masses
Most of us who work in the web/IT industry know about RSS and the benefits it can offer. I have close to 200 feeds in NetNewsWire that keep me up to date on everything from the latest CNet news to comments being posted on several message boards that I frequent. But do “normal” users know what RSS is or how to use it? Jeff wondered the same thing at MacWorld a few weeks ago.
The next version of Safari is going to include an RSS reader integrated into the browser. Mozilla has incorporated RSS into its Firefox browser, dubbing them Live Bookmarks (which I think will help non-technical users “get it” more).
For the past year or two, little orange boxes have been popping up on everything from corporate blogs to major news outlets. But are there other uses for RSS that are being overlooked? Something that could make the normal computer user think “Hey, I could really use this!”
I noticed some time back that Google was offering an Atom feed for Gmail users. It appears to be secure, prompting for your username and password before allowing you to subscribe to it. That got me thinking about other businesses that could use a secure Atom and/or RSS feed to provide customers easy access to information.
The banking industry has been online for sometime, allowing you to login and check your account balance, transfer funds, and many other tasks that used to require actually visiting a branch office of the bank. Would RSS be a benefit to bank customers? Assuming they can maintain a secure login, banks could offer users custom RSS feeds that would inform them on their account balance and what items have cleared.
Podcasting is another phenomenom that has really pushed RSS technology to the forefront. The ability to essentially become your own radio station helped get podcasting off the ground. The ability to notify people when new podcasts were avialable via RSS was an excellent display of what the medium can offer.
We have pitched RSS to several clients in lew of traditional e-mail services (subscribing to event calendars, being notified of site updates, etc.) and some have taken us up on the pitch and some have not. I think they are just not knowledgeable enough about RSS to know that it can be a benefit and not a hinderance.
RSS is really looking for a few good mainstream uses before it is widely used by the masses.
On The Current Site Design
The current design of the site was really meant to be temporary. I just sort of threw it together quickly for the sake of having something pretty to sit on top of my new WordPress 1.5 installation.
I have gotten some good feedback from it and I think I am going to run with it for a while. I will probably be tweaking it here and there over the next few weeks. I want to add the navigation elements for my about and countact pages, as well as archives.
