It’s déjà vu all over again.
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
I’ve lived long enough and been on the Internet (Usenet? Arpanet?) long enough to know that everything repeats itself. But I wasn’t expecting the “RSS is dead” meme to come back again so soon. We probably should just brace ourselves for an every year or so rerun.
Apparently this round started with a web designer named Kroc Camen. He was really ranting about the lack of an RSS button Google chrome and the position of the button in Firefox. But no matter. If you want to see the evolution of this round, check out the summary by Matt Ingram.
The 21st century internet has Magpie Syndrome and loves the shiny and new. RSS is over a decade old. It isn’t being talked about in the media. It’s not a buzzword typically used in Twitter trending topics. No one mentions it much on Facebook. Although… it is being discussed over at the latest web darling: Quora.
RSS, is plumbing. It is a fundamental part of the web’s infrastructure. And this is a good thing. It takes an authority like Seth Godin to stop folks in their tracks and explain how to use RSS.
Then, another blogger in my RSS reader, Rex Hammock, puts up a post about how RSS is a long way from dead. In it he makes several great points about how RSS is really the technology behind all those links being shared on Twitter and other social networking/media sites. That it is RSS that enables the prolific bloggers to even get to the point of Information Overload — just like we wrote about.
Part of all of this is the repeated mantra of “RSS is hard to use”. And part of this is “RSS is invisible”. In both cases, along with the issue of information overload, we think that the core solution involves visualization.
We think that Heatmaps are a start to getting a handle on the dual problems of Blog Overload and of finding RSS hard to use. We really want to know what you think. And what your overloaded friends think. So… check out the new heatmaps. Then let us know what you think. Either here in the blog comments, or directly on the Bscopes website. Then tell a friend or two and have them let us know what they think as well.
P.S. If you do check out Heatmaps and decide that you’d really like to be able to see a customized heatmap of your own set of RSS feeds, then make sure you’ve clicked on the big, orange, RSS button in the sidebar. Because when that feature gets turned on, we will announce it right here on the blog.
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