I’ve been doing a lot of work on RSS the past few weeks. I got my RSS feeds working and validated, I’ve installed and love my first RSS reader and I’m starting to tell my friend and clients about RSS in general. Which means that I’ve become a fanatic and I’ll drive everyone nuts from now on.
In my reading of a few RSS feeds about RSS I found an interesting thought. The idea is that RSS really creates a tightly focused extremely anonymous feed that allows users to have control, while not having to give details to the owner of the feed. To get this type of data before, a user would have to give up their email address. So if the user is not giving their email address out as much, one would hope spam would end up going down, or at least not increase.
On the flip side, to properly validate an RSS feed, you need to have an email address. So while users may be limiting their exposure to email harvesters the content providers are increasing their exposure.
In addition, the content providers no longer have a direct way to access the users except the RSS feed, which goes to all of them at once.
There are a lot of things that will end up coming from this, but giving the control back to the user and forcing the content providers to produce better content are the two largest ones that I see immediately. So why do they have to produce better content? Because I can delete the RSS feed with a click or two and they have no way to get me back.
So the bottom line for me is that I happily will provide RSS feeds and I will never sign up for a newsletter again. Give me a feed and don’t ask for my email address if you want me to read.