The joys and pains of RSS.

For years, there has been a lengthy debate going on in multiple media companies about how best to handle that little orange box known as Really Simple Syndication. If you don't know what RSS is, you probably won't finish this article, but just in case: RSS is a method that Web publishers use to push material to readers who've signed up to receive it. Like an e-mail newsletter, it allows readers to know what's on a blog or Web site without actually visiting the site; instead, they use one of many RSS readers to look at an aggregate of sites sending them RSS feeds.

Like many facets of Web publishing, RSS presents obvious opportunities, some less obvious but real headaches, and a big chunk of unknown. It's instructive for me to go back to an article I edited in 2004; written by TBM contributor Matthew Yeomans for Time Europe, it's a remarkable reminder of how little about RSS has changed in five years. Yes, RSS is hugely more available today. But the two big questions—will RSS ever really go mainstream? and can Web publishers find a way to make money with RSS?—still lack definitive answers.

No one can say with certainty how many Web readers use RSS; an October 2008 Forrester report put the number at 11 percent, which feels roughly right to me. Why haven't more Web users adopted RSS? For some, despite the word "simple" in the title, RSS is too complicated. For others, it might be alienating and clunky. I remember being pretty excited a few years back when I first started using MyYahoo. After a while, though, I found that it just didn't work very well. Some blog posts would show up four or five hours after they were posted; some would never show up. Was this the fault of the reader or the publisher providing the RSS feed? Who knows—but the more important question is: How motivated is a busy person to find out, then fix every instance? For me and I suspect millions of others, the answer is: Not very.

There may, of course, be good reasons to provide a service even if only a small percentage of your readers use it. Not every New York Times reader does the crossword puzzle, but to stop publishing it would send paying readers away. And so The Big Money allows (here my publisher would like me to say "strongly encourages!") readers to sign up for RSS feeds sliced in a variety of ways: all stories, individual blogs, most-read stories, etc.

That's not to say we've solved the crucial question of what readers want from RSS. The conventional RSS feed was effectively a headline service, forcing readers to click through to the actual Web site or blog. This makes sense to publishers, for whom traffic is a kind of religion. But there is also the option of offering the full text of articles and blog posts via the RSS readers. Many publishers reflexively reject this option for fear that it would stop readers coming to the site.

More than any writer I can think of, financial blogger Felix Salmon (now on Reuters.com) has argued vociferously against this view. You can read his argument here and here, but let me summarize it as a logical sequence. Web publishers want bloggers to link to their stories to drive traffic. Bloggers are heavy, disproportionate users of RSS feeds. Bloggers can more easily find content of interest via a full-feed RSS, rather than having to click through on hundreds of headlines. Ergo, publishers should offer full feeds.