I posted before Chrsitmas about the launch of the new websites for the Herald and the Dominion Post. At the time I focussed on the fact that Fairfax, in keeping with their strategy for their Australian papers, had not implemented RSS feeds on the site. I charitably described it this way:
Smart move. Why would you want to cater for your audience when it is the advertisers that are clearly your cherished relationship?
The reason that I bring this up again is a post on Read/WriteWeb that looks at the adoption of Web 2.0 by MSM.
What is clear from the article is, more than anything else, the fact that for the organizations that they looked at (and it is by no means a representative sample), all of them offered RSS feeds. In fact, that was the only point of solid convergence. 12 out of 12 offered RSS feeds, and even those sites that weren’t offering any of the more recent social media services at least offered feeds.
The Bivings Report reaches the inevitable conclusion:
RSS has definitely gone mainstream. For just about any new website, having an RSS feed has become a basic type of feature.
I couldn’t agree more. RSS is no longer an ‘nice to have’ or a tech gimmick on a site — it is a basic constituent of a modern, well-designed and usable website.
The social media services, however, are still maturing. The Herald implemented these features in their rebuild. On most pages there is a bar like the one at the head of this post inviting you to submit the article to social media like del.icio.us and Digg. Scoop recently put Scoop It into alpha, suggesting that the appetite for social media in NZ is enjoying the sort of upswing that we are seeing across the globe; but it is not quite primetime yet.
So, I have two questions for you:
- Do you use the buttons on the Herald site?
- Why don’t Fairfax get it?
Realistically, I only expect answers to the first, because I think that there isn’t an answer to the second…
What does it mean for us?
RSS has matured and is now a big part of the game. Once IE7 becomes the ubiquitous browser – and that is probably only months, not years, away – then we are going to see feed stats on all our sites go through the roof.
As communicators, we need to be well ahead of this curve. If you can’t get a reader on your desktop, subscribe to an online one NOW. If you still don’t grasp the whole RSS thing, follow the links on the resources page and get started. You won’t look back.
