[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4Cast #197: RSS is dead, long live the Tweet?

[Editor]

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 
<http://www.oplin.org/4cast/>
OPLIN 4Cast

OPLIN 4Cast #197: RSS is dead, long live the Tweet?
September 29th, 2010

RSS sad face 
<http://www.oplin.org/4cast/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/rssface.gif>The 
October 1 demise of Bloglines that was announced a couple of 
weeks ago launched a raft of articles about the decline---or 
not---of RSS readers. Many libraries use RSS feeds from 
their websites to pass along news and announcements to their 
patron base. Some people now think that RSS feeds are being 
replaced by even shorter "feeds" from Facebook and Twitter. 
Perhaps the lesson here for libraries is to cover all your 
bases. Don't depend on RSS alone to publish your news, and 
don't ignore Facebook and Twitter.

    * Twitter has killed RSS readers
      <http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-has-killed-rss-readers-traffic-to-google-reader-down-27-year-over-year-2010-9>
      (Business Insider/Henry Blodget) "RSS readers, the
      wave of the future a few years ago, are now basically
      toast, thanks largely (we think) to Twitter, Facebook,
      and other forms of social media (especially Twitter)."
    * Bloglines update
      <http://blog.ask.com/2010/09/bloglines-update.html>
      (Ask Official Blog, 9/10/2010) "The Internet has
      undergone a major evolution. The real-time information
      RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog
      feeds) is now gained through conversations, and
      consuming this information has become a social
      experience. [...] Today RSS is the enabling technology
      --- the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a
      means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of
      itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed
      significantly, and Bloglines isn't the only service to
      feel the impact. The writing is on the wall."
    * No, RSS is not dead
      <http://gigaom.com/2010/09/13/no-rss-is-not-dead-and-neither-are-rss-readers/>
      (GigaOM/Mathew Ingram) "While Twitter may be more
      real-time ---and built for consuming news in a way
      that relies on the principle that 'if the news is
      important, it will find me'---there is still a place
      for moving outside of Twitter to look for alternative
      sources. In fact, many of the tweets with links that I
      wind up reading and saving come from either RSS itself
      (from people's blogs published to Twitter) or via
      someone's RSS reader."
    * Saying "RSS is dead" is dead
      <http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/13/rss-is-not-not-not-not-not-dead/>
      (TechCrunch/MG Siegler) "If I said 'RSS' to my mother,
      she would have absolutely no idea what I was talking
      about. If I said 'Twitter' or 'Facebook' to her, she
      knows who those are --- she even uses them. That said,
      RSS does still often provide at least a partial
      backbone for those services she does know. For
      example, it's RSS that auto-syndicates the content
      from TechCrunch to Twitter and Facebook where she
      reads it."

*/Competing Fact:/*

Last February, Hitwise 
<http://weblogs.hitwise.com/us-heather-hopkins/2010/02/facebook_largest_news_reader_1.html> 
published data showing a significant decline in /visits/ to 
Google Reader, but now Google 
<http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/09/welcome-and-look-back.html> 
has published their own data showing that the number of 
Reader /users/ has been continuously increasing.
------------------------------------------------------------
The */OPLIN 4cast/* is a weekly compilation of recent 
headlines, topics, and trends that could impact public 
libraries. You can subscribe to it in a variety of ways, 
such as:

    * *RSS feed.* You can receive the OPLIN 4cast via RSS
      feed by subscribing to the following URL:
      http://www.oplin.org/4cast/index.php/?feed=rss2.
    * *Live Bookmark.* If you're using the Firefox web
      browser, you can go to the 4cast website
      (http://www.oplin.org/4cast/) and click on the orange
      "radio wave" icon on the right side of the address
      bar. In Internet Explorer 7, click on the same icon to
      view or subscribe to the 4cast RSS feed.
    * *E-mail.* You can have the OPLIN 4cast delivered via
      e-mail (a'la OPLINlist and OPLINtech) by subscribing
      to the 4cast mailing list at
      http://mail.oplin.org/mailman/listinfo/OPLIN4cast.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.oplin.org/pipermail/oplin4cast/attachments/20100929/84919947/attachment-0001.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: kubrickheader.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 38379 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.oplin.org/pipermail/oplin4cast/attachments/20100929/84919947/kubrickheader-0001.jpg
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: rssface.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 1598 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.oplin.org/pipermail/oplin4cast/attachments/20100929/84919947/rssface-0001.gif