SXSW: RSS: Not Just for Blogs Anymore

I was hoping to get more out of this panel, especially from the speakers assembled, but they specifically included time (half of that allotted) for audience show and tell. This was ok, but not exactly what I was expecting.

Direct from industry leaders to your ears, the newest ideas and developments in the world of Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

The panelists were Adina Levin (VP Prod, Socialtext), Scott Johnson (founder, Feedster),
Christopher Frye (VP Engineering, FeedBurner), and Robyn DeuPree (Sr Prod Mgr, Bloglines).

– 75 million in the US and UK use RSS on a regular basis, but only 17-32% know they’re using RSS (MarketingSherpa study)

– comments from Frye:

• publishers are re-syndicating or republishing their own content
• peer produced content
• a lot of Tivo like things are happening with RSS
• items are taking a life of their own, independent of the feed
• we will see some deconstruction – spliced feeds, personal aggregators, re-syndication, mixed feeds
• publisher consideration – how do people know you own this; how do you keep from people stripping out ads or sponsorship?

– comments from Scott Johnson:

• RSS is extensible; this is its best feature
• this is the first XML that might matter someday to my mom
• offer a feed of all your podcasts
• structured blogging; microformats from an RSS; XML nested in a post
• del.icio.us enables link blogging; distributed intelligence
• there are some limitations and problems with RSS:

– tracking
– no JavaScript
– spam abuse
– theft
– give up presentation control
– inconsistent rendering

– comments from Robyn DeuPree:

• Bloglines crawls over 2 million feeds with four to five million articles per day
• you donâ??t need to be a techie to understand RSS
• RSS is a mean of distribution
• like Tivo, you get what you want, when you want it
• thereâ??s more to RSS than just blogs:

– generate buzz
– classified search
– ads
– product newsletters
– calendars and lists
– package tracking
– education
– group conversations
– local interest groups

– Microsoft incorporating RSS is a watershed event (Johnson)