RSS Kills Newsletters
I'm unsubscribing from all my newsletters. If the writer isn't publishing RSS/Atom, I'm not reading. And in a few years time, no one else will be either.
Why? Noise has killed the e-mail medium. My inbox is constantly filled with junk. I'm offered countless ways to lose my money, and even more ways to increase the size of important body parts. I receive a barrage of newsletters I once thought looked kinda interesting but proved, over time, that they weren't.
As a [cough] ex-newsletter publisher myself, I got tired of being on the back foot. Double-opt in, blacklists, rejected delivery because I mentioned the blacklisted term "search engine optimization", bounces, rejects - the list goes on. This is no way to communicate, I thought. Most newsletters go unread anyway.
Then I discovered RSS.
RSS is cool because:
a) there's no spam. I sign up for the feeds I want without giving away an email address. It's the ultimate opt-in.
b) just headlines and snippets. If you want to delve deeper, click through. No wading through some tedious, overblown epic to find out the writer didn't have much to say in the first place.
c) posts drift past you like a river. If something interests you, you click on it. If not, they politely glide off the radar - no deletion/email management required
d) timely. Like email newsletters, but without the hassle.
OK, so the general public aren't going to get this for some time yet, but the tech community has no excuse. How to get into RSS? If you publish, start a blog. If you're a reader, grab one of the many aggregators, sign up for a few feeds and you're away. Simple. Clutter free.
I just feel so clean.
Why? Noise has killed the e-mail medium. My inbox is constantly filled with junk. I'm offered countless ways to lose my money, and even more ways to increase the size of important body parts. I receive a barrage of newsletters I once thought looked kinda interesting but proved, over time, that they weren't.
As a [cough]
Then I discovered RSS.
RSS is cool because:
a) there's no spam. I sign up for the feeds I want without giving away an email address. It's the ultimate opt-in.
b) just headlines and snippets. If you want to delve deeper, click through. No wading through some tedious, overblown epic to find out the writer didn't have much to say in the first place.
c) posts drift past you like a river. If something interests you, you click on it. If not, they politely glide off the radar - no deletion/email management required
d) timely. Like email newsletters, but without the hassle.
OK, so the general public aren't going to get this for some time yet, but the tech community has no excuse. How to get into RSS? If you publish, start a blog. If you're a reader, grab one of the many aggregators, sign up for a few feeds and you're away. Simple. Clutter free.
I just feel so clean.
