Just one day after making a vow to use a kinder, gentler tone in my blog, I come across Rick Ord's blog, via Teresa Valdez Klein at Blog Business Summit. While I promise not to rant, I can tell you this, Mr. Ord will not soon make my new list of Technorati Favorites.Other than a couple of statements,I'll get to in just a moment, I pretty much disagree with everything in that particular post except, maybe for one or two of his commas.
To capsulize, Ord argues that blogs are just over-hyped weblogs that somehow turn fiction. Further, he contends, RSS is nothing more than a reincarnation of Pointcast, the first Push technology product that got much press coverage in 1996 before falling into end user disfavor and eventual oblivion. Ord argues that RSS is no more than a of that. He goes on, but I won't.
I agree with portions of two of his statements. First he said a blog is just a website. Well, it is a website, but it's very special new kind. Let's look at a few fundamentals:
- Websites are developed in HTML, a programming language. Most people can't develop a website. Blogs are developed in natural language. No programming is involved. Just about anyone can do it.
- Websites are time and money consuming to change, so they rarely get changed. Blogs are cheap and easy to update they get changed often.
- Search engines notice changes. Blogs go to the top of the list. Websites are pretty static. They fall to the bottom of Search Engine rankings.
- When you disagree with a website you can shout at your computer screen, or you can send an email to someone named [email protected]. With a blog you can post a comment, or link to it and post a blog of your own as I'm doing right now.
Now let's go to the second statement by Ord, where there grain of truth. Pointcast was the first Push technology and for that it receive much well-deserve editorial coverage. But it was also annoyingly pervasive and very hard to remove from your computer once you installed it. If you think about it, RSS is indeed Push technology. But there the similarities end. Consider:
- Pointcast was sender controlled. RSS is wonderfully user controlled. You decide what you get, not the company. You don't have to tell the sender who you are. They don't get to know your email and they therefore don't get to send you special email offers for the remainder of your natural life.
- As I said it was hard to get rid of Pointcast, but you can subscribe to RSS with a single click and the sender, who didn't know you were there to begin with, doesn't get to argue with you in the form of more junk email.
- RSS is highly user efficient. When you subscribe to an RSS feed t pushes it to your desktop, usually your email client It uses bold face to tell you when there's something new, saving you time of opening unupdated folders. The average user can stay current on 50 RSS feeds daily in less than an hour's time. The old way was going to multiple websites and checking each web page on each site to see if something new had been added. If you hurried you might cover 10-12 in an hour, but most of the time you'd be looking at information, you'd already seen.
- RSS is potentially more significant than blogging and many websites, particularly at news organizations are RSS enabling pages. I think more traditional websites will follow suit. This is significant, not just for the efficiency, but because it puts the decision-making powers into the rightful hands of the receiver, rather than the sender.
There's a lot more that could be said on these issues. I could write a book about what's different between RSS and blogs vs. static websites. Come to think of it, I just did.
