Why RSS is more effective than email in term of one way communication?
NewsNiche has posted a article about his take on “RSS is more effective than email”.
That article is more into webmaster point of view, but in this post I want to add in a readers’ prespective - What are the benefits for subscribing RSS instead of email newsletter?
- Protection: Anonymity on your identity (as NewsNiche mentioned).
- Categorization: Feeds are usually already categorized. For instance if you are subscribing lifehack.org’s feed, you know the posts will be related to lifehacks and productivity. It saves you time to filter through with different topics.
- Separation from one way communication (what you read) to two ways communication (real emails). Together with feed readers tool like web based or application based, you can read when you needed without interfere with emails that you really need to attend.
- Organization: One feed is usually seen as one page in feed readers, other than email may clutter into several email.
- Swiftness: For RSS feed, once I hit submit on this post, you are immediately able to see the post when you re-update the feed. This is much faster way to deliver and read news and article compared to email newsletter that you may need to wait for one day or even one week.
Are there any more advantages on RSS feed vs email newsletter and comments?


Comments
Allan Burns says on May 31st, 2005 at 2:17 am
Danny,
Great points. I would also like to add that from a subscribers point of view RSS is a great time saver. You are updated as soon as which ever sites you are subscribed to updates their site. This save you making wasted visits to sites when they have not been updated.
To balance as you have said RSS is a one way communication, otherwise the subscriber could not remain anonymous. RSS is not going to replace email because of this, but at the end of the day it was not ment to.
Allan Burns says on May 31st, 2005 at 2:19 am
Sorry Leon, I ment to address this to you instead of Danny. Thats one thing RSS can’t fix ;).
Randy Charles Morin says on May 31st, 2005 at 5:04 am
People who think email is more effective than blogs and thus you should do email. They are wrong! People who think blogs is more effective than email and thus you should do blog. They are wrong! The most effective solution is to have a blog where people can subscribe in an RSS reader or via email. I call it Rmail.
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/rss2smtp.aspx
Leon says on June 2nd, 2005 at 10:50 pm
Good feedback, Allan.
Web Tasarım says on July 24th, 2007 at 3:25 am
Thank you for information Allan.
RSS rules
Lazer Epilasyon says on October 5th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Thanks…
wow powerleveling says on March 28th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Every man should marry. After all, happiness is not the only thing in
life.
bjseek says on March 28th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
ã??ã??Success is a relative term. It brings so many relatives.