American Demographics on RSS

While this American Demographics article came out in hard copy in September, Noah Brier's piece is now available online through LookSmart.

NewsGator gets a nice plug and quote: "We see a lot of companies having employees create internal blogs so that they can talk about what they're working on -- and replacing internal mailing lists with RSS," says Greg Reinacker, CEO of NewsGator Technologies, creator of RSS aggregation software.

The focus is around content and getting the "right stuff," into the hands of those searching for ways to clean up their desktop.

In the article, CEO of NetHawk Interactive's Robert Mendez says, "Content is king again." NetHawk's message to its customers is simple: embrace RSS technology. "Augment the marketing you do now with RSS. Take all that information you're shoving down people's throats through e-mails, newsletters and Web sites and start a few feeds."

There's also a nice quote from Clay Shirky, a highly respected voice in the world of social software and a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.

"RSS changes the way people access information on the Internet. It puts the onus of matching readers to content where it belongs: on the publisher. The old expectation was that the user would do all the work. Most sites are not updated that frequently. What RSS does is it lets people off the hook for searching. Everyone's pattern before RSS was, 'I'm not going to pay attention to a little Web site, I'm going to go to the big guys and trust them to look at everything else.'"

Now, anyone with an aggregator has the power to pull information from any number of sources as it is published. You don't need the big guys and you don't need to visit 10 different Web sites for information in 10 different areas. You can plug the feeds for those sites into your aggregator and be informed of their updates as they happen.

FeedBurner is filling the quantitative hole in the market by giving RSS publishers hard data. If publishers run their feed through them, they can track all the clicks that come through the feed and report that information to them.