KevinPittman.com

So today at work I was reading about an RSS extension for Firefox. Basically it formats RSS feeds for you and bookmarks them so they are easily accessible. The one I chose to install and try out is called SAGE.

Basically, the extension completely kicks ass. No longer do I need to visit website to read their content. It’s plain text, and it’s much faster than visiting the actual webpage. Sage actually lets you create, or download, a stylesheet; making the text customizable and easy to read.

Now here is where I run into a problem with my conscience. Knowing how much work I put into my own blog’s design and how much work my friends put into theirs, how crappy is it of me to just read their blog entries through an RSS reader? Here people have put a lot of time and effort into designing something; creating something to add to the flavor of their blog. In bypassing all of that, aren’t I effectively saying that I would rather read your content with my boring and plain looking RSS reader than go to your thoughtfully designed page? Ouch, that kinda sucks…

Now I’m not saying RSS is evil and the end of webpages as we know them (more on this later). It certainly has its place. I like to read slashdot, but I find their design somewhat cluttered - RSS is perfect for this. I also love how you can use RSS to bypass a lot of advirtising. In some ways I feel like RSS is the tool created for nerds, by nerds. It’s the secret backdoor all the techies are using to say “screw you” to advirtising on the web. It will stay that way until it becomes mainstream… and trust me it will soon.

And what happens when it does? Well I think this is when things will get interesting. What will be the point of thoughtfully planning out a web design and doing usability studies? When the normal web is so over-run with ads that everyone turns to RSS, doesn’t that leave the design element up to the user? And where does that leave us, the web designers? Where RSS is concerned, content really is king.

In an effort to make our content easier to read and more accessible, we are letting users happily skip by our hardwork. There is something good about this though. By giving our users an RSS feed, we are saying our content is good enough to stand on its own and that we are publishing it because we want to, not to make a profit off of ads.

Either way you like to look at it, the RSS paradigm is an interesting one. I’m for any technology that allows for more usability, and RSS is definitely one of those technologies. If a reader believes they can format my page in a better way than I, then they should have the opportunity to do so.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2004 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Technology, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.