RSS

Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy.
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superdezign
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Post by superdezign »

I'm usually directed to a Wiki by a human. :P

Wikis always seem too intelligent. I find anything dealing with a complex topic seems to assume that you are already familiar with the topic.
matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

The why of RSS? Very simple: instead of me going to sites checking for any updates, I'll just let the sites tell me when there is something updated.

Like a manager of a big company. Instead of visiting all 300 employees daily and asking how things are going (and in 280 cases hearing that nothing changed), they tell me when something important is happening.

The advantages should be obvious.

For a website owner, the advantage is that it's a lot easier to create a bigger reader base. Keep in touch with people who visited the site. How many times does someone visit a site and think "that's an interesting site, I must remember to come back later" and of course he or she forgets? Now it's a matter of subscribing with one click and the reader is reminded of something new.

So I wouldn't say that RSS is just something for the technical news-junkie. Quite the opposite I think.

However, RSS is not yet well known among the general public. That will change though.
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superdezign
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Post by superdezign »

Most people I know that don't use RSS are hard to convince into using it. They usually feel that it's "too much effort" (even though it's the exact opposite) ,or that they'll feel obligated to come back to the site (which is partially true, though it's not really a bad thing). I think that if RSS feeds, firstly, looked prettier (Safari's is very well organized) and that we didn't refer to them as RSS feeds (something like "Keep up with the site's updates... Click here!), we'd have more users.
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