Forbes Doesn't Get RSS

Business Logs brings us this unfortunate news about a recent Forbes.com review of the new Industry Standard site.

The worst part of the website according to them is: "The site lets you subscribe to RSS feeds, a complicated, XML-related way of reading news which doesn't serve much purpose here."

Say what?! Clearly Forbes has lost touch with the world of today because in my experience RSS is as simple as putting the URL of the site in my newsreader and having it check the feed daily. When it's updated it reads the new headlines and lets me know. Heck, even if I didn't have a newsreader or web browser the RSS format lets me read the article just by looking at the code itself.

It's sad to see a major publication post such opinions, which are obviously ill informed.

Wow. You can say that again. To add onto PR Opinions' note that blogs are simply a tool, Forbes needs to look at it this way: You have "print this story" and "e-mail to a friend" capabilities attached to each of your stories. Why? Because you want to make Web site content as easy as possible for your visitors to consume and share with others. Well, that is exactly what RSS helps you to do.

Not to mention, as Micropersuasion tells us, "there's money in them there feeds." This also makes RSS well worth learning more about.

For more reasons why RSS rules, check out Business Log's post on Fear of RSS.

Comments

[Jeff Jones]

In addition to all the astute observations you've mentioned many software developers are starting to put RSS readers into their browsers. Several Mozilla based browsers, most notably the new version of Safari soon to be released will make reading RSS feeds as simple as viewing we pages.