Law blog RSS via ‘My Yahoo!’

Bloggers wanting to deliver RSS to people with My Yahoo! accounts can now register their blog at Yahoo and incorporate an ‘Add to My Yahoo!’ to their blog template. Folks who have a My Yahoo! account can now easily add RSS feeds to their My Yahoo! accounts. When browsing a site with an ‘Add to My Yahoo!’ button, users may click on it and have the site’s RSS feeds delivered to their My Yahoo! page.

There is an excellent FAQ on the feature at Yahoo that walks you through the procedure from both sides – from a blog publisher’s perspective and from the perspective of someone wanting to receive RSS. Also runs through the process of generating a link for the RSS delivery for your blog.

It’s in beta but it works and is pretty cool. I just enabled the feature with the button you see on the left below my search box.

Amy Campbell, a well respected blogger from Harvard and marketing person for businesses, including law firms, sees this as big step in making RSS easy to use:

This is a step in the right direction and what I’ve been waiting for – an easy way to manage RSS feeds in one place without having to download and install software on my system (which is a real deterrent to using aggregators, I don’t want to take the time and trouble to download some software that may create compatibility or other issues on my now solid platform). Also, it formats headlines cleanly and simply.

I am not sure I agree totally with Amy. The Yahoo interface for presenting RSS feeds is very nice but I still like having a news aggregator on my desk top to get my newsfeeds from blogs and other sources having RSS. I am not sure I am going to jump over to Yahoo to get the information I want, especially when it is surrounded by a lot of other stuff Yahoo wants to show me on the page. In addition, as folks like Microsoft and Apple build RSS into browsers or email clients, that will be a more convenient way to get RSS feeds.

But I really agree with Amy that RSS needs to be advanced to get it used on a wide scale basis and that Yahoo may help. Amy put it very well:

[M]ost people don’t even know what a blog is, let alone an RSS feed or how to actually utilize an aggregator. I think blog enthusiasts miss this point often. RSS needs a PR campaign. It’s not going to be mainstream, until it’s simply a button that people can push. Syndication needs to be incorporated into web tools and news sites with less jargon and requiring less technical understanding. Yahoo!’s taking a step in the right direction.

If Yahoo helps bring RSS to the masses, I say great – bring it on.