I’ve been saying for a while that RSS poses problems for publishers, and that users suffer from RSS feed readers that are mostly pants. Looks like the Slashdot crew is starting to feel that way too, if you read down through the conversation there.

Turns out RSS suffers from many of the problems (suffered before it by the web, email and Usenet) it was supposed to fix, especially when brought to a world that doesn’t have all day to plough through its newsreader. As Paul Kedrosky discovers:

“In way too many current cases RSS is just a clunky high-volume replacement for web browsing. Rather than making it easier to consume information, it makes it easier to drown in context-free news, inducing that panicked feeling we all eventually learn too well when you see an RSS folder stuffed full with hundreds of unread posts.”

Exactly. RSS may not be the cure, and certainly won’t be if the reader software doesn’t get much better. Technology’s not the only answer, either; we can only absorb so much information, and few of us know of any techniques to help us master the huge flow of the stuff we face every day. Maybe we just need to hit “unsubscribe” more often.

But whether or not you cut down, it all seems to be another good reason why excerpt-only RSS feeds are a Good Thing; if you’re scanning hundreds of sites a day you want only the gist, not the detail, for the majority of the stuff.

That said, the story that starts the Slashdot conversation - a Yahoo! report (PDF) showing only 4% of internet users knowingly use RSS - isn’t that great a revelation. I’m sure not many computer users realise they’re using RISC processors, although the arrival of RISC was a big deal when it happened. Few computer users could tell you the version number of the web browser they use, although that used to be a big deal back in the day too.

Other recent innovations - podcasting, v-casting, Voip, HDTV and the rest - will need to break through to this level of mass, unconscious use if they’re to fulfill their promise. I’m sure they will, in time.

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