RSS branding.

2006-02-24 Me · Websites

For quite a while now Robert Scoble has talking about supplying full content on RSS, and quite often the arguments boil down to a branding issue. After all you are not exactly driving people to your site with RSS, supplying them with your well prepared graphics, and giving them much experience outside of the comfort of their RSS reader.

Or are you? When I was away from my RSS reader the other day (the excellent NetNewsWire) with five minutes to spare I was thinking, what sites shall I check. What shall I do. Shall I go to BBC news?

So it occurred to me, I wasn’t get the experience that I would do from my feeds, I knew that I wanted to do some reading, and I knew that I wanted the experience of my feeds in that 5 minutes.

But as we all know 5 minutes going from website to website is hardly time enough to do the DNS lookups, whereas with NetNewWire I can go from Dilbert to National Geographic, to a flickr feed, to my friends blogs, to Reuters, and further taking everything in, and distinguishing between the feeds.

This is the experience that I am after and this experience is good branding, I have stripped away everything that I don’t need – the non related graphics, the extra features, the speed of getting there and I am presented with what I value most. And this creates a positive image of feeds that I am subscribed to. And with this comes positive brands.

When I can read these feeds in full and get excellent information I don’t need to jump ship, but I am held by the content of what is being produced but I want it in that 5 minutes, already downloaded, not an extra click away, not a bookmark in my Firefox. Long live full feeds.