Web 2.0 - RSS: Syndication Strategies and Business Models
The first session attended today was a lively workshop where some of the thought-leaders in RSS/Blogs discussed the future of RSS. Here are some of the interesting observations and comments.

Does RSS hurt advertising revenue?

Jeff Jarvis kicked off the discussion by suggesting that RSS feeds prevented commercial sites from displaying their content. If you view a site's RSS feed, you don't see their ads and the feed owner is not able to determine your actions. He suggested that RSS needed to allow cookies of some description so that we can track who is reading our feeds.

Bob Wyman from PubSub argued that RSS feeds may make advertising difficult, but it is not something we haven’t faced before. He pointed to AOL, circa ’95, when they introduced proxy servers that made it difficult for publishers to report accurate data to their advertisers. He suggested that publishers should not try to track the use of their RSS feed, but instead track the individual entry/post.

An interesting point was also made that RSS is not "one size fits all". Some people use RSS to syndicate feeds to their own site, while others only use RSS to read blogs in an aggregator.

Someone else suggested that the balance of power was shifting. At the outset of RSS, publishers had the power. Today, the people reading the RSS feeds have more of the power. For example, the WSJ only syndicates a summary of each story through RSS, while the New York Times feeds the entire story. Readers are switching their alliances based upon the type of content being syndicated.

Yahoo employee and Blogger Jeremy Zawodny suggested that RSS does not mean the death of page views. He believes that people will still want to visit a site in order to read comments, add their thoughts and be a part of a blog's community - all things they do not get by simply reading a post via a RSS feed.

Should RSS be tagged?

Attendees appeared to be split 50/50 as to whether RSS feeds should be tagged to identify the content. For example, should RSS evolve to allow tagging which would allow subscribers to more easily find products and services as compared to editorial or news stories?

Jeremy suggested that if a larger company such as eBay, started tagging their content, it could be the standard that others would follow.

A company called LiveDeal has already taken RSS feeds to the next level by allowing you to subscribe to RSS feeds for products for sale in your local area.

Paid RSS Feeds the future?

A lot of discussion on whether there should be two different types of RSS feeds. Free RSS feeds would contain limited content and shorter entries. A paid RSS feed would allow content providers to still generate revenues from its valuable content. The WSJ currently favors this model with its RSS feeds.
Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |