Chapter 25. Making RSS Meaningful

One of the major difficulties in encouraging users to overcome the strangeness of a new Web technology and start taking advantage of it is in realizing that people don’t care about the technology—they care about getting things done. Instead of selling technology, we need to sell the benefits of the technology.

To put this in context, consider RSS, which has failed to gain mass acceptance for a myriad of reasons. There’s the potential difficulty of learning something new. There’s the risk that the benefits of using a news reader aren’t worth the effort of setting one up and incorporating it into your daily life. And there’s the fact that most people—even some who are already using a news reader—have no idea what ...

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