RSS gets a little friendlier

Those folks who have a My Yahoo! account can now easily add RSS feeds to their My Yahoo! accounts. When Yahoo! returns search results from a web site that has a headline news feed (RSS), it includes a link that reads “Add to My Yahoo!.” (I just enabled Amy Campbell’s Web Log with the “add to My Yahoo!” button on the right.)

This is a step in the right direction and what I’ve been waiting for — an easy way to manage RSS feeds in one place without having to download and install software on my system (which is a real deterrent to using aggregators, I don’t want to take the time and trouble to download some software that may create compatibility or other issues on my now solid platform). Also, it formats headlines cleanly and simply. See Add to My Yahoo!.

At a recent meeeting, I witnessed a group of very intelligent professionals (for whom computers/web is not their business) and it was amazing to see how rudimentary their approach to using even simple search engines is. What I’m trying to say is that most people don’t even know what a blog is, let alone an RSS feed or how to actually utilize an aggregator. I think blog enthusiasts miss this point often. RSS needs a PR campaign. It’s not going to be mainstream, until it’s simply a button that people can push. Syndication needs to be incorporated into web tools and news sites with less jargon and requiring less technical understanding. Yahoo!’s taking a step in the right direction.

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  1. […] risk averse. Similarly, the term and concept of RSS feeds is difficult for most people understand (see earlier post on slow adoption of RSS). And, RSS takes that little bit of extra time to set up and understand, that frankly, most busy […]