No RSS feed? A genetic marker for ‘lame site’
Robert Scoble, Microsoft blog evangelist and publisher of Scobleizer, posts today No RSS feed? It’s a genetic marker for ‘lame site’. “So, marketers,” Scoble says, “if you are being compensated for building lame sites, keep on building sites without RSS feeds.”
Arose out of comments he he was getting that Microsoft’s Xbox site is lame because it doesn’t have any content. Scoble agreed, but pointed out what really makes a site lame is the lack of an RSS feed. He goes on to make a very compelling case using the Xbox site and how it could be brought alive with an RSS feed.
Acknowledging the Xbox site has no content, Scoble says add an orange XML icon to the site. What changes? A few things, per Scoble:
- Now the site promises FUTURE content. Bing! Bing! Bing! New stuff gonna come. This site won’t stay static. Static sites are lame. Don’t believe me? Well, do some Google or MSN or Yahoo searches. Which sites invariably are at the top of the list? Sites that change often. Why is that? Why do sites like Engadget and Gizmodo have more traffic than most corporate home pages? Content changes often is the #1 thing.
- If you don’t have an RSS feed, your site is lame because you’ve told the connectors (er, superusers, er influentials) that they don’t matter. When I see a site that doesn’t have an RSS feed I see a site that says ‘Mr. Scoble you aren’t welcome here and we don’t ever want you to come back again.’
- Sites, like the Xbox one, that try to get customers to sign up and give an email address to get new content are telling customers ‘hey, we wanna spam you and we want our spam to be mixed in with all those Viagra spams you get. In fact, if you really are an advanced user we want our content to be shoved into your ‘junk’ folder. Yes, our content is junk.’ Do you really want to be saying that? An RSS subscription, on the other hand, goes where +I+ want it to go. Hint: that’s not into the junk folder.
Good stuff and you law firms with Web sites not using RSS and asking users to give you their emails, expect to have your sites called lame – at least by me.