E-Media Tidbits

RSS is for geeks. ... Well, not really, but that awkward acronym isn't terribly accessible for non-technical online users -- unfortunate since RSS technology is so important to publishers. Indeed, there have been calls for a less-geeky name for RSS. Fellow blogger Amy Gahran even ran a contest last year that came up with the more understandable "webfeed" to describe RSS feeds.

Now DenverPost.com has released its new custom RSS reader, powered by News Gator, called News Hound. It's a standalone application that website users download for free, then set up with desired RSS feeds (webfeeds) for DenverPost.com content channels. Users then read headlines and summaries for stories within selected channels; clicking on a headline launches a Web browser with the full article on DenverPost.com. (It operates like many other RSS reader applications, and of course can include feeds from other websites.)

The connection between paragraphs 1 and 2 of this item is that DenverPost.com is avoiding using the term RSS. As executive producer Gil Asakawa notes, information about News Hound does not mention RSS, except in the FAQs, where an explanation of RSS is included.

Says Asakawa, "We think that RSS won't become a mainstream concept until non-technical people can use it. We hope News Hound will help our users take advantage of RSS -- without even knowing about it. ... It's the same approach AOL took to popularize the Internet and make it mainstream in the mid 1990s. We're making RSS useful to regular folks, not the early adopters."

(Not that he's ignoring experienced online users. Asakawa's project for today is "adding all the XML URLs to our site so the geeks can have their DenverPost.com feeds too.")