Scott Porad

I disagree with Steve Gillmor’s recent essay, Rest in Peace, RSS, that declares RSS is dead.  There, I said it.

Now, it’s scary to say that because Steve Gillmor is a legendary tech journalist whom I respect tremendously.  For me to even assume that I know 1/10th of what Steve Gillmore knows in his pinky finger is audacious.  Nonetheless, I think he misses the mark.

To summarize, Steve says that he’s completely abandoned his RSS Reader (Google Reader) and now gets his information entirely from Twitter.  In short, this is the money line:

Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content.

Well, yes, that is correct: Twitter is currently the best early warning system for new content.  Once upon a time, RSS played that role, but Twitter is faster at getting it out there now.

However, in my view, to say that RSS is dead is misunderstanding the inherent value of RSS.  First, with RSS I don’t miss anything because it’s all there in my reader.  With Twitter, if a tweet with a link to a blog post flows by while I’m out of town, then I’ve missed it.  Second, Twitter doesn’t push actual content, it pushes headlines and sound-bites.

In my mind, here’s the analogy: Twitter is to RSS as the newspaper is to news magazines.  In other words, Twitter is to RSS as The New York Times is to The New Yorker.[1] I subscribe to both (seriously), but value them for different reasons.  I will miss a story or two (or two hundred!) unless I read the NYT religiously every day, and the stories will become dated.  On the other hand, I pretty much catch every story in The New Yorker and they are far less perishable.

All that being said, Steve is right that RSS is no longer the early warning system for new content.  However, that doesn’t mean you should abandon RSS–not all content is about immediacy.

RSS and Twitter are just tools for consuming information, and what’s important is to use those tools appropriately.  In fact, I think you will be making a mistake if you do abandon RSS because there is plenty of great information that is just as valuable tomorrow as it was today.

You should sign up for my RSS feed which you can do by clicking here.  Subscribing to my RSS feed will save you time by pushing my blog directly to you, and ensure that you don’t miss anything important.

[1] – Perhaps a more apt analogy would be that Twitter is to RSS as network TV evening news is to The New Yorker

Gradon Tripp wrote a post last week about his great experience with the band Quiet Company.  Here’s the story in a nutshell:

Gradon posted on Twitter that he had heard the band and liked their music; the band was listening on Twitter and sent him a message back with a link to a sampler pack of their songs.  In addition, they told Gradon to share the sampler pack with anybody who he wanted.  That led directly a CD sale because Gradon like the music, and to word-of-mouth becasue Gradon told everyone about his wonderful experience.

Brilliant!

To a musician, the name of the game is audience.  Unless you already have a big audience who is buying your music, then you’re better off giving it away in order to build the audience.

With digital music, there’s no incremental cost to providing a copy for free.  Some might say, “well, the musician isn’t getting paid for that copy of the song, so there is a cost.”  But, the people you are giving the music to weren’t going to buy it anyhow.  Effectively, you’re giving away something that cost you nothing, and that nobody was going to pay you money for, in exchange for getting a new potential audience member.  That seems like a pretty good bargain to me.

By giving away the music, the bands are going to create an audience that will buy the music (and other things like concert tickets, merchandise, etc.) in the future.  The famous investor Warren Buffett has an expression for this: long-term greedy.   That is, that is making less money today, so as a result of building an audience, you will make more in the future.