Are RSS Feed Readers Irrelevant?

Lately I've been thinking about RSS Feed Readers.

Subscription analytics from the communities I manage, digital properties I own, and input from people who are in the know all point in the same direction:

Feed Readers have become irrelevant.

I'm interested in your input as well as your hypothesis. Why has email dominated feed readers for subscription rates? Let me give you an example:

Two months ago I noticed ADMAVEN had been losing traffic from feed subscribers. I installed email subscription code (check upper right corner) to see what would happen. Now over 60% of my active feed subscribers receive their updates via email.

I manage the Innovation Engine Community. After working through the analytics, it's clear that under 5% of the Community's thousands of active members get updates via RSS Feed Readers.

Is it time to kill the RSS reader subscription links that have become so prevalent on the web and replace them with email forms or other, similar technologies? What has your experience been, and how have you changed tactics to give your readers what they want?

Nick Kinports (follow him on Twitter @ADMAVEN) has worked in the interactive technology world for over 9 years, and helps the Fortune 100 identify unmet consumer needs, create ideas to fill those needs, and bring them into market. He currently works at Maddock Douglas.

Washington DC - Politics and Advertising

Having spent the last couple of days in Washington, DC working with clients - it has become clear that Web 2.0 applications are more important than ever in reaching political audiences. Politically charged messages are ofter overly complex, burdened by the structure of the political system and the sheer amount of information that needs to be communicated.

I found much talk - more than I expected - about how to use technologies such as podcasts, feeds, and social network services to reach into the personal lives of target audience members and have an open dialogue about burdensome political messages.

I am interested to know how you have been using social media to access campaign information and reach out to like minded individuals online. Please feel free to leave your thoughts in comment form.

Nicholas Kinports (follow him on Twitter @ADMAVEN) has worked in the interactive technology world for over 15 years. He is the Digital Strategy Lead and founder of Chicago-based digital marketing firm lonelybrand, where he directs the creation and execution of digital marketing programs that generate measurable signups, conversions and sales.

Yahoo Buzz: Room For Growth?

Since making its official public release three days ago Yahoo Buzz has generated just that: a lot of buzz. But has it delivered? The premise of any site using the user rated content model (YouTube, Digg, etc…) is to push relevant articles into the hands of readers by peer voting. Of course any organization can submit its own writing – ADMAVEN does it for every article – only large groups of individuals voting for a submission will bring that particular article to prominence.

So far Yahoo Buzz has acted more like Yahoo Drone.

In press releases and interviews leading up to the public opening of Buzz, Yahoo stated that individual bloggers, small-time writers, and other such users will be given a chance to be on the front page and vaulted into relevancy. Unfortunately that just has not happened. Major news organizations dominate the first page of articles, with a few non-syndicated bits buried deep within the back pages.

My advice to Yahoo Buzz is simple: get rid of the New York Times, Salon, Times.com, and all the other major news organizations bloating the service. We know where to get that information, assuming we don’t already have RSS Feeds set up for it. The key for Yahoo Buzz should be to carve out a niche of relevant, user generated content that includes the blogosphere, videos, and other popular media. In this way Buzz can differentiate itself from its competitors and get away from the traditional news aggregation model that so many other sites employ.

Nicholas Kinports (follow him on Twitter @ADMAVEN) has worked in the interactive technology world for over 15 years. He is the Digital Strategy Lead and founder of Chicago-based digital marketing firm lonelybrand, where he directs the creation and execution of digital marketing programs that generate measurable signups, conversions and sales.