Thinkcorps

One thing I’ve been mulling about in my head this morning is how people really need to pay more attention to their RSS feeds. Most people think they’re cool and all, and yet they don’t bother to customize them—many people just use the default templates provided by MovableType, for example.

This is BAD, people. RSS is going to be great because it will be useful and used. If people are using it, then it’s a front door to your site, and you need to be sure it’s making a good impression.

What I’m saying has surprisingly far-reaching implications. The interesting thing about RSS feeds is that, because RSS readers are designed to present news items in an easily readable text format, when linking to a Web page, the reader tends to like it better if the page is uncluttered and the body is on the left.

For example, while BoingBoing’s RSS feed isn’t quite perfect (I’d like to see the diff authors’ names on their posts), it shows full article text (good) and when you view the Web site in a reader, it shows up well (body column on left).

Many sites will make a conscious decision to only use RSS for headlines—since they want to drive people to the site (for ad views or whatever). That’s fine, but sites that don’t care should provide full article text in their feeds, no question.

The other thing I was thinking about was why RSS should be integrated into an email client. RSS is primarily famous today because of its ties to blogging. Blogging is cool because it’s super simple, but powerful content publishing. Much like a wiki, blogs lower the bar, making it easier to contribute, and RSS feeds make it easier to keep tabs on those contributions.

So, say, in a group or corporate situation, I can see great value in team or project blogs, allowing members to share thoughts or update others on news, and the RSS feeds simply extend that to anyone who wants to keep up on a team/project’s situation/progress. If the blogs are company based, then the RSS feeds are really the ‘news’ of your company, so to speak.

This is a really great way for anyone within the company to keep up on what others are doing, and clearly needs to be integrated into email (assuming you’re of the mind that people only rely on a few key programs, email being one of the most important).