Mediathink RSS White Paper

Mediathink produced a white paper on RSS publishing. The study takes a look at the current aggregator space for the Windows operating system. The study found RSS to be a strong threat to e-mail and established search companies slow to respond the corporate intelligence and product research uses of RSS. Rich media RSS is discussed as an inevitable next step and integrated into TiVo-like devices (with BitTorrent possibilities).

We see RSS as the single best method available to receive information from selected sources. RSS possesses the unique ability to eliminate the usual chores of search, navigation, and interruptive marketing avoidance currently required to receive most of today’s valuable news content. By its virtues, we see RSS disrupting email’s current hold on point-to-point communication and growing its share of user attention faster than any web technology preceding it.

One of the challenges listed in the white paper is the inability to track how many subscribers are receiving a given RSS feed. Subscriber measurement is no different than tracking Web site statistics. Requests for a RSS file will appear in your log files just as a request for a HTML page appears now.