Feedburner does tell you when your feed is failing.

When I log in to Feedburner I can see the troubleshooting area but I don’t find anything about notifiying me that my feed is down or unreadable.

Am I missing something?

The true worth of this type of technology is only just beginning to be understood.

Backward opinions like these are pretty pointless

I don’t think they are as obscure as you make them out to be. I believe 90% of the websites (both popular and geeky) I visit make prominent use of them. Furthermore, the popularity of such services as googlereader, netvibes (5 million users), pageflakes, and the like which use a lot of rss feeds, show that RSS feeds are indeed popular. Maybe not as popular as email…but give it a little time.

I do remember a time when web browsers were only used by geeks and were not mainstream. Now every company has a web address. It just takes time for things to be adopted. RSS has alot of potential, and with some time and having people come up with intuitive ways to use RSS, it will become more mainstream.

trackback??: http://myity.wordpress.com/2006/10/16/6th-reason-rss-feeds-are-not-popular/

But every major web browser (other than the ancient and obsolete Internet Explorer) *does* support RSS feeds.

I found this by using an RSS feed. The irony is killing me.

> I found this by using an RSS feed. The irony is
> killing me.

Yes, but nobody has exonorated you from being a geek. See, that’s the problem. It’s not that *you* or even that I saw these feeds. It’s that they aren’t receiving popular adoption. I mean, I agree that HTML was originally for nerds, but what is out there to convince regular people that this isn’t just another buzzword? We need “the MySpace of RSS”…

Like Opera Feeds? Firefox Live Bookmarks?

Not angry or against RSS. I just wish it was better. I use the RSS reader on this website daily. My concerns for how popular RSS is comes from me having to send weekly emails to website owners about broken RSS feeds and not getting any response. This is just the opposite of when I email them about a bad link. Links seem to get fixed. RSS feeds do not. Sometimes I even get a “sorry we will not be support RSS any longer.”

Many of the comments about RSS are very insightful and informative. I am happy to learn about Sage and the fact that Opera has a built in RSS reader. I will give them a try.

I did try and not make this article too geeky by talking about standards and formats and the fact that unlike a web page a RSS page is very unforgiving. I will save those things for a later blog.

But all of this aside there is one question that keeps nagging at me. To those of you that are commenting on how easy and useful RSS is the question is:

“Do you think of yourself as a geek?”

I do consider myself one which is also one of the reasons that I wrote this article. I also do hope that this article reaches those that have not tried RSS and makes them curious about the possibilites.

And IE7…..

Besides, a lot of people use RSS feeds without realising, in MyYahoo! and stuff.

I think you missed a big one. A lack of good feed agregators built in to the major browsers/oses. With a good feed aggregator a user can be immediately notified when new items are added to the feed. This means that feeds on things like discussion boards and blogs are almost interactive. Plus intermitently down feeds are not a problem. Your aggregator just shows what it has, and if the site’s down you just don’t get any new stuff. If more of the big browsers made a decent feed aggregator, you’d see people more incline to use it. Maybe Google toolbar needs one?

Just a couple of quick things:

- FeedBurner’s FeedMedic will alert you to problems with your feed. You can see it on your account under the troubleshooting tab, or you can subscribe to it as a feed.

- Using email to feed serves helps visitors that don’t understand what RSS is to get updates. I have quite a few who subscribe by email

- There are some good articles that you can point your visitors to that help explain RSS in very basic terms such as:

http://cravingideas.blogs.com/backinskinnyjeans/2006/09/how_to_explain_.html

- And finally with simpler to use readers like Google’s new version, many non-technical people are starting to get it. As another commenter mentioned, many are using RSS through MyYahoo! and similar services, without even knowing. Which is a good thing. The more transparent it can be, the better (like in IE7 when it’s released to the general public).

the last thing XML is sensitive to is whitespace. You can create dense XML that no one can read except a machine with no whitespace. The rules about XML whitespace are so they are easily readable by humans.

Now it is very picky about proper syntax which your error show.

hahaa! me too..

One other reason I think, is that your average non-techie web user (well, me anyway) actually prefers to browse websites and have things presented to us in a nicely laid out fashion which varies from site to site, rather than have everything from those sites presented to you in some sterile list, despite acknowledging its aggregating power.

I am not a geek, I raise cows, but I do use RSS feeds to expedite reading the news and keeping up with technology changes. RSS is a great time saver, and yes they do fail, but as I use several that appear to duplicate news, I have a source for all the stories I care to read. I use RSS in firefox and in Thunderbird but different types of feeds in each. I average about 200 feeds a day and it takes me about 1-2 hours to read the news and delete duplicate articles. I also promote RSS to friends who have to read the news on line also (we are 80 miles from the nearest newspaper).

THIS is the reason. Looking at RSS feeds is just BORING. It reminds me of, um, coding. blagh.

Adding RSS functionality to a well-designed website written in just about any framework available is simple. It’s so simple, that it’s worth doing. Even if only a small percentage of your website’s users use the feed. It’s an excellent way to publish your website in a machine readable way and we have yet to understand the implications of that. Perhaps there will be no substantial implications to adding RSS to your site, but it is simple and fun to do so do it.

The google of rss stock info: http://marketio.com

An XML document with space at the top will not validate. A text editor my add carriage return or some simlar whitespace at the top of the XML document. This also might happen if the document is created on the fly by PHP. PHP will add in a part of the last used buffer as a carriage return. This is why it is important to clean the buffer before printing an on the fly XML document in PHP.

In my experience, browsers expect you to notice some update indicator, then open a bookmark folder in order to see what’s going on in a feed. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I have long since learned to ignore various things that try to attrack my attention in a browser. So I never used to check feeds.

Then I started using Mozilla Thunderbird for RSS. Feeds look like folders in a newsgroup. Pick a subject, get the page in the message area. Follow a link, up it comes in Firefox. I can hide/show all my feeds with a single click on the “News & Blogs” folder. Now RSS is useful!

As soon as we start engouraging users to save their feeds in mail and news readers, widespread adoption is sure to follow. I’ve set up several non-technical users this way and have had great results. And Thunderbird is a superb replacement for Lookout, er, Outlook.

http://blog.ambitonline.com/

- FeedBurner’s FeedMedic will alert you to problems with your feed. You can see it on your account under the troubleshooting tab, or you can subscribe to it as a feed.

Found it thanks!

It took a bit of hunting around though. The end result being looking in your account settings for Feedmedic. It has to be activated also.

What is the point of an RSS reader, all it does is aggregate headlines/snippets for me. I still have to navigate to the site to read the story. Think about it, I have 10 news sites I go to daily (of which some are themselves aggregators, like Digg). What additional value is an RSS Reader giving me? None. Ok, maybe if I was techie keeping track of 100’s of blogs and boards, I might find value in not having to go to 100’s of sites … however, most (99%) of people don’t need this type of aggregation, the value just isn’t there until you hit 20 sites daily.

Some value might exist for commoners if the RSS reader could download all the content, and eliminate all those ads … of course most of the content I read is from sites that rely on that very advertising for their revenue … so of course they won’t let someone steal it and serve it without those ads.

RSS will likely continue to be a technology that helps at best 1% of people. Especially with sites like Digg, that dynamically put news in front me … and requires zero work from me.

I definitely agree with the way people view RSS currently. RSS is something that is goiing to take some time for people to figure out.

With that said, I think IE7 will play a large role in making RSS more popular. The integration with browser, I believe, makes it much more user friendly and understandable from a user standpoint.

Andrew
WebDev101

I want to say something about the comments that the list is not a full five reasons. But not get into a philisophical discussion or one based on semantics (word usage, I hate that word).

The cause of a RSS feed not working is not the same as the effect. So a broken feed, the state is a ligitimate reason as is sensitivity which may be the cause of a broken feed. Though the sensitivity may apply more to the technology used.

When I wrote “sensitive” I was thinking more about how an average website owner will not know why their feed is broken. They look at the code output and see something that looks like HTML but does not work for some reason. Unlike HTML, which is very forgiving, a bad XML page is more than likely to be removed rather than fixed. I think this is why I get those “rss is no longer supported” emails. They just turn off the function.

There’s really no excuse for improper XML.. any feed generator should be able to encode characters, remove whitespace, wrap content in CDATA, or whatever is necessary.

And if it works with one reader, it should work anywhere. If not, it’s a problem with the client.

My pants are loose!

Game over, you lose.

C’mon, now, is English really that hard?

XML doesn’t really care about whitespace, except for the first line. If the file begins with anything other than < ?xml ...>, then it will break.

That should be: if it doesn’t begin with “<?xml …>”

My pants are loose!

Game over, you lose.

C’mon, now, is English really that hard?

Never mind that would probably be too much information ;)

Thanks.

Hi - We do have a ‘personal feed’ that you can subscribe to which will post to the feed whenever there are problems with the feed (timeouts, validity probs, etc.).

–Rick Klau
VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner

Hi, Rick

I must say you are a fast and aware guy. You have responded to both my mentions of feedburner in the last year.

Thanks!

Could elaborate a bit on the “personal feed” and where to find it?

Safari includes a feed reader also.

Please fix spelling of unfortunately in 2nd sentence.

Mozzilla Firefox does have a biult in rss reader

Seeking to discard my 6th reason (http://myity.wordpress.com/2006/10/16/6th-reason-rss-feeds-are-not-popular/) on the basis that Opera, Firefox, Thunderbird etc all have reader features, or promoting the use of web based or standalone readers are just proving the point. You’re *mostly* the geeks, just like me. I think there was one comment that I saw in the 3+ pages of comments from a non-geek - and even then, being a farmer doesn’t preclude you….

I stand by my claim: the vast majority of ordinary users will not go through the pain of trying to understand what an RSS Feed is, let alone try to use it. IE7 will change it a bit, but you can hardly call that a reader. Outlook 2007 will be better. I’ve yet to see the application that will make RSS accessible to the masses.

Because your own feed for this article and blog doesn’t work.

Not sure my friends and family would agree. Anyway, feed was broken - see reasons 2 and 3 in main article. The language was incorrectly set to nothing.

http://myity.wordpress.com/feed/

I was surprised when most of my friends who work in the IT field are not aware of RSS and the convenience it brings to surfers. Now I’m acting like an evangelizer teaching them how to use RSS and its features.

I agree that RSS is not that known to people. Look at sites like NEooWS.com, this site is powered by RSS, people dont really need to know what RSS is to use it. It all about getting different kinds of news.
Take a look, http://www.neoows.com. You have to register to really see the features.

I have two blogs and geek friends have asked me why I don’t have an RSS feed. Now I can tell them I have five good reasons!

We all have favorite places on the web for news and information - and the amount of news and information generated each day is obviously going to increase.

So how do we ensure that we don’t miss out? It would take fooorever to trawl through the list of site’s on a daily basis, and even then - we’d have no way of knowing if there are new articles to read without actually visiting each site.

RSS feeds allow us to get hold of content from our own personal lists of favourite sites, and let us view that all in one place. It saves time - simple as that.

If you could show me a viable alternative, I might be willing to believe your article - but as far as I can tell RSS is here to stay for a while.

It’s a shame you chose to inform your readers of the drawbacks, rather tahn the benefits of this technology…

(P.S. Firefox has have RSS cababilities built in since public release (live bookmarks), and IE7 also has integrated RSS tools)

I think you are miss reading the article. The author only states that RSS is not popular with the masses. Not that RSS is going to die or be replaced. Java was not popular for a long time as I remember.

I agree most of the people that use RSS are the savvy “Geek” type people. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We as in people doing podcasts and blogs and the like, need to share the knowledge of what RSS is. Because RSS is one handy thing and can help many non Geek types. Also I believe that the new RSS capabilities built into IE7 will help those new to RSS. But most of all the people that publish this content need to share the knowledge to these people that have not discovered the magic of RSS.

I dont think Java is popular these days in a broad audience. There was a time with all those awful animations for websites when it was quite popular. Nowadays its more used in the backend and for some portable apps.

I think, the same will apply for rss feeds. Aggregators will used it as the backend technology. Ordinary users wont see it as a frontend tech.

Greetings.

sites like feedmashr.com are addressing this issue by taking the techiness out of the equation

I think you are absolutely right, but like einstein’s calculations in the deflection angle of mercury, you are right for the wrong reasons :)

Broken feeds mean nothing. Feed readers just ignore them. So long as the readers don’t throw up weird cryptic dialog box error flags, and even then, hey, just look at the old MacOS! People are quite conditioned to the unreliability and incomprehensibility of computers. We have a certain vendor’s “Blue Screens” to thank for that.

So I don’t buy THAT argument, but I do agree that RSS is uninteresting to anyone but a geek. It isn’t because geeks forgive the machine, it is because geeks love to BE the machine. Dig: Who else would type in HTML codes by hand? Clearly those are typesetting codes that should be inserted TRANSPARENTLY by a word processor! “Real people” don’t ever want to see them. Ditto for RSS. I remember the split-screen “show codes” mode in WordPerfect, and I don’t think ANYONE but the geeks actually enjoyed that service, and most folks would curse the software every time they were forced to use it.

As William Burroughs said in that Nike commercial: “Technology should serve the body, not enslave the mind”

Feed readers themselves don’t help. A survey of them tells us there are many models for “How to read aggregated feeds” and I have this feeling that in fact very few of those models make any sense to “real people”, however much they may make sense to geeks. I have InfoRSS in Firefox, I drag and drop RSS chicklets to the status bar and POW, every update now appears in the status bar to be clicked to ignore or to read, it works fabulously for my particular needs …

but get a load of the control panel!! I have shown this to others, they are intrigued by it … until they see the configuration screens. Geeks love to be machines, real folk just want to get back to work.

The obstacle to RSS is the technology: RSS is intended to be a machine-to-machine communications method, it should be so. It should never appear to people, it should be TRANSPARENT. It should be as transparent as .VOB and .IFO formats in the DVDs they get from the rental shop. A mere technical trivia.

And it needs a better name. RSS and XML are not names, they are TLA’s, and as such they scream at people “You are not welcome here unless you have a pocket protector and live in your mom’s basement!” Browsers should simply pulse an icon that says “Subscribe” when the “alt” header tags are detected, orange chicklets should go the way of the Dodo.

Because people do appreciate subscriber services. Mailing lists are really just RSS via SMTP, and mailing lists are the number one most popular transaction method for online information exchange! 60% of all internet packets are STILL email packets! There has to be a clue in there somewhere.

I run a website at http://www.teledyn.com where I just put my own aggregator online for anyone else to read. I thought at the time it was an extention of the Good Old Days (1991) when those of us with nothing to say would place our browser Bookmark file online (even before Netscape started storing it as enhanced HTML!) and, y’know, my aggregator became popular! Primarily with Knowledge Management people, whom I was very surprised to learn were themselves not geeks, most of them not very technical at all. It took me years to convince their primary professional community portal to add RSS.

I also run a local community journal for my rural town, a very non-technical audience. We find that in the day to day practice it is only the technically minded who will dare to post on the site, but I also get complements for the sidebar material … which is an RSS aggregation!

And these are all examples using the very same “broken” RSS world that you are citing. Clearly it is not the reliability or the validation of the format that is their obstacle, it is all a matter of the tools available to use those feeds, and so long as we insist on making tools only the geeks CAN use, we will only see the geeks (and wannabees) using them.

Java not popular?? Board a city bus at rush hour, walk through a shopping mall, sit in a park: Java is everywhere!

Don’t you use a cellphone?

I remember sitting in 9th grade math class and the guy behind me showed me a new CD he’d bought. (It was The Cars’ Heartbeat City) I asked him how he was going to play it. When he told me you had to buy a CD player, I thought, “Yeah, everybody’s going to replace their stereos so they can buy those?” I really didn’t think at the time it was going to catch on. See? Who cares if the talk is that RSS feeds are unpopular - the bugs will be worked out, the word will spread about them and someday, we’ll all be using them. That’s just how technology works.

“Only geeks use RSS feeds. Is this true? Unfortunately yes.”

It is true that RSS feeds are not popular but I’m not quite sure they are limited to geeks. RSS is sooooo simple to use that there is no need to have specific technical knowledge or appetite. Everyone using or browsing a blog knows what is RSS. Simply because it is a native feature. Additionally, numerous websites details “what is RSS” while CommonCraft made a killing with its video: http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

I think that the three true and combined reasons why people are not using RSS feeds are:
1 - Mainstream software are not RSS compliant. Internet Explorer is far from friendly with RSS which makes a lot of people out of the picture. Major Software vendors have been surprised by the 2.0 movement and are running late to be back on tracks. Most of them label old products under “2.0″ while real “2.0″ products are developed by start-ups.
2 - A lot of people still are addict to emails, faithful to some sources and search engines. RSS introduces a different consumption of the web. People naturally are conservative, innovation needs time to widespread. In any case, I’m pretty sure that both ways of accessing the info will coexist in the future.
3 - The wild wild web is increasingly using RSS technologies but it is not the case in corporations. For the majority of us, the office is the place where we use computers and learn new ways of using it. However and because IT people are poorly informed on web2.0, they don’t understand the benefits of using related technologies behind the firewall so that they don’t implement RSS (and blogs and wikis and social bookmarks …).

Olivier Amprimo - http://www.headshift.com

Well, I am a techno geek and I still don’t use RSS. There have only been a couple of times when I even considered that it might be nice to have it. But when that happened — which is rare — the hassle factor of installing and configuring was the final stopper.

But the real reason I don’t use it is because I don’t find the proffered content to be compelling.

Interestingly enough, Microsoft was one of the first companies to try this, only they didn’t call it RSS they called it “Active Channels” (IE4). But it was the same idea, other people could “push” unknown content onto your computer without your control or consent beyond the initial sign-up.

Frankly that sounds like a pretty scary scenario to me. I already have enough problems as it is trying to keep viruses out of my system without giving them an unlocked unguarded side-door through which to enter.

Show me some compelling content and maybe I will reconsider. But think on this, Microsoft did have some compelling content — remember the “Disney channel” ? well, at least some people would find that compelling. But the whole thing was a flop. Nobody wanted it and they discontinued it. My experience was that it was interesting for about 15 minutes. But after that I disabled it.

And once it arrived via automatic delivery, you still had to read it in the same browser that you would have used if it were on a website. So where is the gain? That’s why I turned it off after 15 minutes… I realized that there was a huge downside, and no upside for the recipient. There is an upside for the content producer and that’s why people keep pushing the idea, But what is the actual benefit to the consumer? I don’t perceive it.

I am also not fond of mailing lists (including emailed newsletters) although I do actually subscribe to a couple of them, I divert them into a separate email folder and read them when I feel like it, I would much prefer a web forum. email is a clumsy way to view rich content, I see no net gain from having them in an email folder.

I am inclined to think that bottom line, people like going out and gathering those things that we are interested in. We do not like being force-fed something that someone else thinks we might be interested in. And the delivery mechanism is just not interesting enough to hold anybodies attention. I would much rather go out to an interactive forum or view a nice looking blog.

For instance, if you had an RSS I would not sign up for it. But your site looks nice enough and has content enough that I will probably come back. The fundamental difference is that I get to look at your index and pick and choose what interests me. Ticker feeds are fine for Madison Avenue and UPI, but don’t expect me to be interested in being force-fed. The novelty of the telegraph and ticker tape machines wore off long ago.

And then there is the further consideration that I have heard rumors of disagreements about and incompatibilities in the RSS standard.

codeslinger — compsalot.com