RSS Is It Really Something Special? - December 3rd 2006

JUST HOW USEFUL IS RSS?

RSS is generally considered to mean Really Simple Syndication and is a technology for disseminating news and other articles around the internet. I decided to add RSS feeds to the Activeminds web site because I’ve been believing all the hype delivered to my inbox from Web Pro World and Site Pro News. These are two of the primary resources for professional web site developers. The technology is straightforward to implement. I haven’t implemented RSS before and the whole task only took me about three hours for the blogs on this site. For reference, I used Danny Sullivan’s notes to get started and then figured out how that basic stuff has been extended by the BBC News site. The BBC has had RSS feeds for quite a while so I figured they’d probably know what they were doing.

So, since it’s easy enough to implement an RSS feed there doesn’t seem much of a reason not to do so. However, I wonder just how often RSS is actually used. A straw poll around here of averagely intelligent internet users elicited the unanimous response of “What’s RSS”? Are there any internet users out there who have news readers, subscribe to RSS feeds and look at the results? If so, I would like to hear from you. Personally I can’t see any merit in doing so since the information you get from RSS is extremely limited. If I want to find out what’s happening in the world, I go to the BBC news home page to look at the latest headlines and stories. These stories are arranged in order of importance (as determined by the BBC) and are accompanied by relevant pictures. The very latest, breaking news items that haven’t got to the stage of being articles yet are shown as headlines in a scrolling banner. Within the RSS feed on the other hand, the stories are arranged in chronological order with the newest at the top. There are no pictures and no breaking news items. This leaves the user with the possibility of easily missing stories like: “Plane crashes into World Trade Center” because the latest news story happens to be “Mrs Williams’ Cat Stuck Up Tree Again”. When you actually click on a story from an RSS feed, you get taken to the source page anyway. Since the likelihood is that you’ll end up on the web site where the story originated, why not go there directly and cut out the RSS middle man?

In the pictures on this page, you can compare the BBC News front page with their RSS feed from the same time. At the time the shots were taken, four of the top six stories from the RSS feed are considered important enough to be included on the news site home page.

The other use for RSS is for web site developers to incorporate an RSS feed into their web page. This makes a bit more sense to me because it means that a widget manufacturer can take a news feed from the widget association and dynamically display the latest headlines on their web site as soon as they appear on the associations’ site without having to add them manually. Of course, if a user clicks on one of these feed items, they’ll get whisked away from your site to the originators site. If that happens, they may never come back to buy something from you so do you really want to encourage that?

There is one type of web site that does benefit from RSS feeds, and those are the spam sites whose sole purpose is to make money from pay per click advertising. These sites set themselves up as directories and advertise on the pay per click sites at the lowest cost per click they can get away with. They also use search engine optimization techniques to get as high up the regular unpaid search engine results as possible so some of their visitors get to them free. Within the spam site, their sole purpose is to host pay per click ads that on average are paying more per click than the directories are to attract the incoming traffic. When a hapless user clicks to one of these directories and then clicks another ad to get somewhere more useful, the directory site pockets the difference between the pay per click fee they had to pay and that they get from the companies whose adverts they display. The only winners here are the spam site developers who can make thousands of dollars per week by doing virtually nothing and by providing no useful service. Of course, the search engine companies would prefer these sites to go away so they employ techniques to try and ferret them out and delete them from their indexes. Spammers retaliate by trying to make their site look legitimate and incorporating a few RSS feeds is a very simple way of doing this. It looks to the search engines spiders that the site is changing regularly so they think it’s probably legitimate and leave it alone.

There was a suspected case recently where one of these spammers auto generated over one billion web sites and submitted them to Google and got them added to the index. With so many extra sites to choose from, it was inevitable that many of them would appear on the first few pages of the search engine results. The potential here was of the spammer making millions of dollars from this technique. Google never commented on the suspected case so it’s impossible to confirm if it happened or not. However, I can easily see how it could be done and if I was an unscrupulous person I think I could quite easily do it. The neat thing about the technique is that there’s nothing illegal about it.

So, my conclusion has to be that RSS is of little or no benefit to internet users or to legitimate web site developers. I’m seriously considering taking it off my site.

Comment by David Sawers on February 14th 2007

Interesting to note that the recent announcement of Yahoo Pipes extends the usefulness and application of RSS. Perhaps it's a good thing I didn't remove it from this site after all.