Recently I attended the Webstock conference here in Wellington, and I had my mind expanded, challenged and opened in so many ways that no doubt I’ll be blogging about it for years to come. But today I’m going to talk about two pieces of information that I heard.
The first was from a woman I talked to who runs a number of blogs. She said that the technical blog she writes gets very few page hits, because everyone in its target audience uses RSS feeds. Conversely, on a blog with teaching resources, almost no one uses RSS. In fact, looking at her stats, she’s able to see that a large number of returning visitors get there by googling the exact address of the site. Meanwhile, in his talk, Russell Brown said that 92% of New Zealanders still don’t use RSS feeds.
If you’re not already using RSS - or Really Simple Syndication - to subscribe to updates for all your favourite sites, it might be a little hard to initially get your head around the concept. Perhaps now might be a good time to throw in a Common Craft video about exactly what RSS is.
So what does RSS mean to government? It means that as uptake of RSS grows, we need to work harder to provide more tailored RSSfeeds, and to ensure that they’re working properly. It could mean that we become more lazy with our websites, trusting you to find the content that you want just by subscribing to it. But if only 8% of the population is using RSS, hopefully we won’t do that!
13 Comments
I know, 92% have no idea … and whilst I still a little unbelieving at how high that seems from my experience introducing this “stuff” into organisations I am no longer stunned by it.
Mind you, the “young ‘uns” might not be able to tell you what RSS is but they probably use it in Facebook and the like. Maybe it’s a technology that (like TCP/IP) doesn’t need to be known but just works.
Having said that. I bet close to 90% wouldn’t know what “reader”, “subscribe” or the wee orange logo are referring to. Good thing is, hardly anyone hates it when they discover it … all growth ahead!
Ahhh TCP/IP, I remember the olden days of using Trumpet Winsock to connect to Ihug right after they introduced flatrate internet accounts. But memories aside, I think you make a good point, Mike. A lot of sites that you ’subscribe to’ are essentially RSS readers - like Livejournal’s ‘Friends’ page, and that’s been around for what, at least a solid eight years? And it’s the same with Facebook’s friend status update feeds. Does an RSS feed by another name still feed as sweet? How do we explain to users that they’re already essentially using a really valuable tool?
And of the 10% who know about RSS (is that what we decided upon?) I would say that there is maybe 2% who use it but would never use it at work.
Personally I love using RSS at work (via Google Reader). After today I will most likely only come to this site to leave comments.
Oh and do you have a link for the woman you mentioned above? With the teaching resources?
Hadyn: is that 2% of the 10%? Or 2% as a whole? Statistics can be very confusing! The link to the teaching resources is: http://createreaders.natlib.govt.nz/. It’s also on our sidebar as a government blog.
Ah, 2% of the whole.
In my experience it tends to be hard to get RSS feeds onto offical govt websites. But I’m not sure why?
well get this….
I am trying to get a newsreader installed on my machine at work. I havent used this function before but it seems worth checking out.
My helpdesk actively discouraged me, saying that only a few people have it and most dont use it (Im in a core government agency). A second helpdesk person was unable to install it after trying two different readers. I am still waiting for them to complete the task.
Karen, have you thought about using an online feedreader such as Bloglines or Google Reader? It means you can check your feeds wherever you are, by logging onto a site (You should of course double-check what your work’s policy is about personal internet time first, of course. But I know most government agencies allow use within reason, and I’m sure that a lot of sites, like this one, are for work purposes).
I personally use Bloglines, and I can check my folder of work-related feeds at home, and my folder of non-work stuff when I’m at home. Or if I go on holiday, I can check all my feeds at internet cafes, or on friends’ computers.
Well, I showed the librarian at my work how to use Google reader to subscribe to some of the things in the online knowledge resources they have in the system. It really is easy, I am not much of a technology expert but it just saves time. I also have work and personal folders set up in google reader(more as a discipline for myself to stop me from being tempted into diversions at work!)
Office 2007 has a built-in RSS reader, and (eventually) I’m guessing it will be a standard desktop app for most Windows users in the public service. Maybe that will be the point when the masses are enlightened and begin to grasp the power of our wondrous series of tubes?
Based on previous experience it may, of course, be a number of years before some government departments upgrade…
Hi from ‘the woman’ mentioned in the post …
I’m Courtney - Web Editor at the National Library. We’re currently running three blogs: LibraryTechNZ, Create Readers, and one of the New Zealand Poet Laureate.
We thought quite hard about audience before putting them out - you can read a bit about this in this post on Hard News. I also blogged about the set-up process here on LibraryTechNZ. Feel free to holler if you’d like to talk about anything.
First off - I should note Create Readers is not for teaching resources so much as for sharing book recommendations and ideas for getting, and keeping, kids reading.
And second, like Hadyn, I’ll follow this blog via RSS - it’s truly not overstating things to say RSS has changed my information world. I got all evangelical about it here at the Library, and ran a couple of lunch-time sessions in our training room, where I taught people how to set up and use Google Reader (because that’s what I use).
It was a funny experience - I found that a significant number of the people came along were there because they were curious about this RSS thing they’d been hearing about, but when we got to the point where I’d say “So, let’s go to some of the sites you use and subscribe to their feeds”, they either (a) only visited a very small number of websites on a regular basis or (b) visited largely static sites that didn’t offer RSS.
I guess to be taken up, used, and loved, technologies have to make your life better. In these cases, it didn’t. Other people I know have flirted with feed readers, but prefer old-school browsing (or felt overwhelmed by the influx of feeds). RSS just might not do it for some people - like Facebook doesn’t do it for me.
Hi Courtney. Sorry, I probably should have mentioned you by name, and linked to the work that you’re doing straight away. I think I was a little overloaded with ideas and conversations when I first made this post. Thank you very much for coming here and adding in your thoughts and clarifying my comments.
I think it’s interesting what you say about old-school browsing. I don’t subscribe to some of the sites that I read because I feel like that would mean I was making a commitment to them, and there are a lot of sites that I read that I don’t actually like! In other cases for sites like the Herald and Stuff, I prefer to go directly to the site to replicate the experience of reading a physical newspaper where there are lots of different stories all vying for your attention.
As inspired by the post and comments I have expanded my thoughts over on my own blog - http://work.miramarmike.co.nz/2008/03/92-of-new-zealanders-dont-use-rss.html