Referred to by some as the Obi-Wan Kenobi of blogs, Scoble (Microsoft evangelist) has some interesting discussions on the use of RSS for blogging. On the one hand, RSS is pretty cheap. It costs nothing to add. It allows people that are connectors and relaters in the network to build stronger relationships within the blogosphere. That said, the blogosphere is grassroots to an extent. Thus, while RSS helps bloggers and those that use aggregators to gather information, to reach the rest of the world one probably also needs to consider other things (e.g., like [choke] using email). To comment on Winer’s comments that not having RSS is like not having business cards – I have to also agree from a cost perspective. That said, I think that there are some businesses and people that have marketed and done deals without business cards. Really depends on the business model.
Anyway, I wanted to memorialize Scoble’s posts here and here because they have very useful learnings in there, even for those that are neither bloggers nor regular readers of blogs.
Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group