RSS and all that jazz

I was running a training session about WoM (measurement of) this week, and it was pretty apparent that most of our audience (UK market research professionals) didn't really know what blogs are. In each of 3 sessions, only about 3-5 people out of 40 said they used blogs, and I was the only blogger out of the lot.

We were also talking about how there are all sorts of tools available now to help people avoid ads (tivo, or Sky+ for TV, RSS feeds and simple pop-up blockers for online). Again, lots of blank faces when were were talking about RSS.

So I was interested to stumble across a post by Steve Rubel about a Forester report on the use of RSS and blogs by teens. Even in the US, only 20% of online teens regularly read blogs, and this falls to 10% of online adults. Now there's a lot of potential in that 10%, but it's still very much a minority. Only about a quarter of those online in the US have heard of RSS, and fewer than 1 in 10 are users.

An adjacent post on Micropersuasion links through to a series of pieces about how to use RSS. The series itself is at CT Biz Blogs.

Now I've been aware of RSS for a while, and do have a few feeds saved within my Firefox bookarks, but I've never felt like I'm really getting the most from RSS - it's all a bit hard work still.

So I was thrilled to get an intro to Sage on the CT Biz Blogs posting. Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader extension for Mozilla Firefox. It's dead easy to install, and pretty straightforward to use - probably easier if you actually bother to read the instructions! And you end up with a sidebar that contains all the RSS feeds you want to subscribe to. You can set up folders and separators and all sorts of good stuff.

So a couple of explicit (product) recommendations from me today:
bookmarks. But I've need felt that I'm really getting the most from RSS. So I was thrilled to read about

• Firefox
• Sage
  

I've also started using del.icio.us today. If I remember, I'll let you know how I get on with it.