I’m technically literate so I take a lot of the process and presentation of technology for granted. My Mom is not technically inclined. I sat in a presentation this week where the presenter didn’t know how to move from one Powerpoint slide to the next and asked the audience to keep up based on handouts. In the wide range of technology, it is understandable that something gets ignored, like RSS.
Most sites these days have an RSS link and a separate ‘Subscribe’ to the newsletter form. They are usually separate both in presentation and terminology. But isn’t the idea behind these two related? Yet, on the same site that has an RSS link and a Subscribe, there may also be a separate Contact Me, or About Me page. It works that way on this site. I didn’t build this site nor design the layout. And until recently, it didn’t bother me that all these obviously connected links, forms and information are not connected together.
RSS is a subscription method where the customer can, through a reader (such as the Google Reader), subscribe to content (like the posts on this blog). When the reader sees new content, the material is presented to the customer via the reader application. The material sits on the reader forever until the customer marks it. The difference between RSS and an email newsletter is who has to do the work but essential the content is, or could be, the same.
Stepping up one level, the general idea is communication. How and where does a website communicate to the audience and where can the audience respond. Websites generally don’t but this all in one place. The savvy audience member has been trained through years of incorrect word usage and acronyms. But what about the person who is struggling to be in the audience at all. What does ‘RSS’ mean to them?
To my mother it means something she doesn’t understand and she won’t click because “I have so many viruses all the time and I don’t know where they come from. The thing may shut my computer down!” So why not a better name (notice I didn’t use moniker there?) that communicates the purpose and not the protocol? Why not have a central place that explains how and where to get regular news from a website?
I don’t think of this as ‘dumbing down’ the web. On the contrary, I think of this as being more clear and useful. Now I have to go off and do it.