Jon Udell at Infoworld, one of the pre-eminent technology media bloggers has picked up on the excellent RSS whitepaper (pdf) written by Phil Gomes.
Jon welcomes a better understanding of RSS by PR people, evaluates the usefulness of RSS (as outlined by Phil) to him in his work as a journalist and makes recommendations. Of course, every journalist is different and some features that Jon may not find useful others may and vice versa.
What’s interesting is the hysteric responses to Jon’s posting.
“PR People know about RSS now � only a matter of time before it becomes useless. Advertising, PR, and Marketing destroy everything they touch on the internet.” Link
“it was only a matter of time before the industry sharks descended on innocent bloggers, coming up with ways to “nudge” them into mentioning their clients’ products and services.” Link
The last response is from a PR person….from the PR school of Karastamatis no doubt.
Anyhow, I digress, all these people who fear PR’s infiltration of RSS, completely miss the point.
Readers decide whether or not to subscribe to an RSS feed. If it’s useful and informative, then they will read it and continue to subscribe to it. If it’s useless, marketing speak, then they will unsubscribe and it will die. This isn’t spam. You choose to subscribe. Our RSS feeds are very popular. If we start posting rubbish they will fail. It’s in our interest to provide relevant content, that it useful.
This is democratic PR at it’s most democratic.
Murphy's Law 