I think content is found more organically now instead of following a site's RSS feed, but, it seems that others think I'm dead wrong about this. Does following an RSS feed instead of visiting the website mean that the site's UI is not inviting enough that the user needs another way to view the content?

The website's UI has nothing to do with it. Expecting me to visit 20 different websites every day is insane. It's just far too much work (just to remember them all, much less the actual clickies). I'm currently subscribed to 170 feeds. I'd much rather visit One RSS Reader a day to get updated on the sites and voices I chose, as opposed to visiting 170 sites a week or a day, each with its own (yes) UI and ads and what have you.

Discovering news "organically" is what I do on Twitter, either via simple #hashtag searches, or by subscribing to the off-the-cuff, 140-or-less, 5-seconds-to-post stream of life that are other users.

I've never needed to go to a recommendation engine and typed in, say, "Borderlands 2" or "RSS readers". Those sorts of queries are far too timely to be subscribed to for months at a time, and it's likely that I'll already get the updates I need from other metrics (subscribed RSS feeds, tweets, mailing lists, etc.). I don't need multiple versions of the same story.

Do you get mostly summaries through the Reader or full content stories? If you only read a summary are you willing to click through for a full article if you trust the source, or are you going to skip the item and look for another source that provides the same article in full form through your reader?

How do you calculate your 'trust' of publishers in cases where coverage seems like it could be misleading? Do you follow mostly mainstream media or do you read a varied mix of content?

Branch, for example, is yet-another site that one would have to visit "every day" to remain "up to date". Given that my browser's startup tabs are already at 12+, it'd have to be magnificently powerful to get in there. It is unlikely that it will, however, and its own saving throw is that it will email me on responses to this branch. Given that it has no RSS support for the popular or incoming branches on its homepage, it means the "popular" and "incoming" are only ever a matter of chance - they're only there when I open the front page vs. collected and marked "unlooked at" in my RSS reader. That's neither "popular" or "incoming" - that's just "random stuff at the time you arrived". There's now no reason for me to visit the home page.

I prefer full-content exports for the same reason I prefer an RSS aggregator vs. visiting 170 sites a day: I can scan the entire article far faster than I can click, wait, and find the meat inside all the chrome. If the article is too long to read in 2 or 3 minutes, or too interesting to warrant just a scan, I'll click the link and throw it in a Read Later pile.

To clarify: I don't read "mainstream" news - I have no interest in local news, international news, sports, politics, or anything you'd ever regularly and typically find on a news channel, newspapers, or on the front page of any "News" (capital N) website.

As a rough example of what I do read, I've categorized my 170 feeds into Google Reader subscription folders thusly:

* ARGs and Hypertext
* Comics and Imagery
* Downloads
* Fortean
* Games: MMOGs
* Games: Mobile
* Games: Potpourri
* LEGO
* Miscellaneous
* Movies
* Preferred Potpourri

and then I have a few (no more than 5 or 6 at a time) feeds that are uncategorized because they DO happen to be temporarily topical. At the end of said temporary status, they either get unsubscribed or moved into a directory.

As a content creator, RSS seems to divorce me from my audience. Instead of maintaining my personal branding and a distinctive voice, I become part of a crowd of indistinguishable chatter.

What kind of things should I do, as a content creator, to make my content stand out to you in your RSS feed?

You're already failing as a content creator if you have to ask those questions. Save for the cover, every fiction book for the last 70 years all have had the exact same insides. The voice, the quality, the word-of-mouth serve you best, not "wow, this purple font is attractive", not "that's a hot chick on the cover". You'll attract some, certainly, but the cover, like your website design, is just one page of your repertoire. For books, most of the time YOU (the author) don't get to choose it - the editor/publisher often have full control and final say over the title and cover.

I guess I went the wrong way with that - as a content creator I require the click through to generate traffic in order to be able to provide raw view data to those that provide me with opportunities to be able to provide some unique content. This includes things such as movie previews, advertisement revenue, contests, etc. In my example I had meant that I had already captured you as a subscriber, so you were interested in my content and voice, but my content could easily be glossed over when it sits next to 170 other articles. I've already acquired you as a subscriber, but how do I get you to interact with my content?

Additionally, as is the case for Branch, how often are you likely to subscribe to a comment feed or forum in order to see those in your reader? Do you subscribe to content via author or subject?

As a reader, I don't give a damn about your clickthroughs or your contests or your ability to tell me the weather or your opinion on the latest romcom. If I came to your site via an organic or engine search, then you "only" have that one article I searched for to read. Your site design is not going to make me click around further - my interest is in clicking the back button to find other responses. If your *content*, not your site design, is good enough (that is, you tickled me, or I liked your opinion, or you seemed smarter or more insightful to me), I'll look for an RSS feed to subscribe to. If you've no way to cater to my reading habits, you've lost me - as above, I've just got too many websites already to look at.

If I've subscribed to you (through some other delivery mechanic besides "visiting your website regularly"), then it's up to me to make sure you don't get lost in the shuffle. You don't really have a lot of choice in the matter: you can either get a subscriber who *might* send you more clicks, or you *won't* get a subscriber. It's that simple, really.

I make no distinction between full-body or summary RSS content. If your headline interests me, I'll click to expand it. If I feel there's more to your summary that might interest me, I'll click through. If your body is in there, I'll scan the whole thing quickly. If it's Good or Too Long, I'll click through.

None of that has to do with interactivity.

To get me to interact with your content, ask me a question. This is where YouTube folks have long been ahead of the curve (FWIW, though I get about 50+ new videos a day, I rarely comment on any of them). A comment form at the bottom of an article simply isn't enough, especially if the article is chiefly about your opinion (which I might agree with, so why bother saying "Me too!") or a fact (which tends to be unworthy past "Oh, I didn't know that."). End the article with a non-generic call-to-action, and action might you get. Even then, it'd have to be something I'm passionate about (like RSS): if it's about a dime-a-dozen topic like movies or music or apps or politics, the signal to noise ratio just won't interest me in the least.

To get this conversation back in line with the original topic - how often are you to click through to a source linked in to an article on an RSS feed? Say an article you read was sourced from LifeHacker, would you click through to find LifeHacker's RSS, or would you not care that you may be missing out on other articles?

How do you go about finding new content to be added to your mass amounts of RSS feeds? How do you pick through the list to know what is good reading and what is just filler?

It is unlikely I'd subscribe to a "popular" Branch RSS feed - "popular" tends to mean there's going to be high signal to noise and that's far too much work. I'd subscribe to an "incoming" Branch RSS feed, as it'd be a cacophony of potentially interesting "in on the ground-floor" discussions. I'd also subscribe to a "My Branches" feed, which would include all the ones I've created / commented on (and any future comments to them).

I WOULD take the effort to subscribe to a single Branch via RSS. It'd go into a timely corner of my RSS reader, and updates would almost always be clickthroughed. Whenever another site gives me a chance to subscribe to an email update of an article I've commented on, I always do so. Push, not pull.

RSS is versatile, minimalistic and automated which makes it the ideal tool if you want to be time-efficient online, specific on a certain topic and flexible on the software/webapps you want to use.
Everytime I surf through a blog/website whose contents I wish to follow up also in the future, I use its RSS, it don't go back manually.
For example RSS is handy also to get notified on pubmed specific searches (via the My NCBI tool)
Furthermore IFTT can trigger an action when a specific keyword or phrase is included in an RSS, opening a series of possibilities.

I rarely click "via" links and only if the child article did a poor job of summarizing or if it truly interested me. Game/movie news? Rarely. This weekend's "blogging less" stuff from Tim Bray? Yes. I wouldn't care that I'm "missing out" on other articles - my reading is focussed on getting through my already-curated reading list, not on finding new things to add to it.

For adding new feeds, it starts with one page view (a search result, a tweet, a mention on a mailing list or other feed, etc.), which piques my interest enough to check out the "list of other articles". If that list interests me, I subscribe. I never say "Man, I need to find new things to subscribe to". Subscriptions are always side-effects of other more focussed efforts.

Ultimately, the question is wrong. RSS feeds are for when you've already [found] a [content] provider you want to read regularly. If you don't know who to find, a recommendation engine might help you. If you care about topics more than providers, RSS might be irrelevant (though, of course, you can get topic searches in RSS).

Asking if RSS is important is like asking if eMail is important. I do very little communication through email but its still a tool in my arsenal. Even if you get a lot of your news 'organically' consider that the person you got it from may have got it from someone else via an RSS feed.

I'm going to branch here into another interesting topic sort of touched on by @Keadin in this latest post [gamerunplugged.com ] : If you use RSS versus viewing an article directly, could you be forcing unwanted content into your stream?

If you subscribe to an RSS feed, there's almost always going to be things that you'll get that you don't want, but it still "costs" me less time, clicks, and effort. Scanning one-line headlines in an RSS reader is far faster than scrolling down through a webpage + chrome that has a paragraph summary per article. I don't think there's an RSS feed I've ever subscribed to where I've clicked every single item (my highest are webcomics with 91% expansion, and my highest news feed is only 60% expansion, followed by a middle ground of 30%).

I think RSS feeds still have really hidden potential. While I look for a link each day to share in my newsletter OneRead.co, RSS has become an essential part in that search. I subscribe to several sites, especially independent bloggers who publish link lists. I'd say about 50% of the time I find the link I want to share through RSS. If you subscribe to a variety of feeds you can really find things no one you know is finding.

The other aspect of RSS that I really enjoy is the fact that it makes browsing really easy.

There are obvious drawbacks to RSS, like being inundated with information especially when coming back from a few days away. Every now and then its ok to declare bankruptcy and mark all as read.

I'm not sure if there is such a trend, I just type out what I'm thinking. I think that content should be movable now. You can't just publish a post on your site, and lock it on the page. Now people consume content in various ways.

Movable content fit in with the needs of social information adoption. Today we rely on friend to filter information, make sure you content can be moved from Person A to Person B. Movable is the foundation of word-of-mouth.

The RSS Readers users is a group of high-profile people which are familiar with social sharing tools. If you don't provide a RSS feed for your content, you lost an opportunity to reach this group which also have high influence on Google+, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

The second reason is Social Pipeline.

The smart people also use RSS feed to build Social Pipeline to connect several accounts on different social media sites through special tools such as Twitterfeed, IFTTT.com, Memolane.com and etc.

If you are a content creator, you have to rely on RSS feed to build your own social pipeline. And, your readers also can build their social pipeline. Together, your content will attract the audience you want.

The third one is Content Aggregation.

There are so many content aggregation tools. RSS feed is important for building a human/machine hybrid aggregation approach. Some times developers manually pick quality RSS feeds, then use machine to generate contents through these RSS feeds. For example, Flipboard. Some times developers allow users to grab a RSS feed, then pick individual items from the content pool.

So, the RSS feed makes your content more open and help your content moving to where your audience is.

I'd also like to add that things like Flipboard on my ipad turn RSS feeds I wouldn't normally bother with (like Facebook) into a different, more compelling experience for me.

RSS isn't just a means of distribution. It can be used to do something new or add value to that content.

I care about my RSS reader, I do not care about your UI (but I do care about your posts), I am selfish that way. RSS reader are about ME, your site (UI) is about YOU. I like it when the data flows from YOU to ME. I like Facebook and Twitter. what YOU are posting is showing on MY page. I do not want to seek your posts on your pages, just to find out you didn't post anything new.

Personally, everytime I publish a new post on my blog I try to use all the tools that facilitate to spread out my content: social plugins, blogging portals and, of course, syndication. I think this last option gives users an easy way to access my content, so, why don't to use it?

I personally think of Google as a company that has the power to change the way we receive the internet's content. I know not everyone uses iGoogle as an RSS reader but I do. It has become a spot for me to aggregate various content via RSS feeds and have it at my finger tips when I initially open my browser. The sad thing is, iGoogle is sun-setting in another 15 months. Being the game changer that they are, this makes me wonder if Google has found a new way to aggregate content or if the web is just changing? With the web moving further and further away from the text based net we were all used to circa 2001, it seems that pure text or RSS for that matter will only naturally be replaced by some new form of content aggregation. I will miss RSS

iGoogle isn't Google Reader, no?

No, not the same thing. You can integrate G

oogle reader though.

Here's a relevant branch on Google Reader:

There seem to be 2 sides to this:

1) RSS (the reading utility) as a means to improve reading efficiency
2) RSS (the specification) as a means to pull content into aggregation and curation utilities

My un-educated guess is that most non-technical folks are unlikely to adopt RSS for the purposes of efficiency and discoverability (though it's hugely powerful if you have a bit of tech-savvy).

Where RSS and similar specifications will be incredibly important are for content curation utilities such as Zite and Flipboard, which go a long way to make discoverability easier for your average user. With the high noise-to-signal ratio in a content-overloaded world, I expect curation/aggregation applications to play a big role in discoverability.

Thanks Bryan, you've found the exact word for this discussion: discoverability. I think there is a great difference between RSS Readers and Content Curators:
The first ones gives the possibility of staying up to date about authors, sources, etc, already found.
Curators can discover us a bunch of good new authors, sources, etc.
Discoverability, what a great term!

RSS feed readers unify the user experience across feeds, media, and media types. It's the equivalent of using a remote control to change TV Channels. In both cases, content discover soars.

To the point about stripping content away from layout... If there were universal keyboard navigation standards across websites, RSS readers would be less necessary. Meaning.. it's really the navigation that has us "hooked", much less so than the wrapper.

There was an attempt at making universal keyboard navigation, roughly around the same time as RSS was in its "ooh, it's neat" prime, and it even showed up as interface items in Mozilla at one time, but it never really caught on.

web.archive.org

I agree on the importance of solid navigation for reading, but it seems a universal standard isn't something to strive for as we move toward a more mobile world where you don't have a keyboard. I think a case can be made that any standard for something as eclectic as the web would hamper innovation as well.

I think the best course for content creators is to try an innovate where they control the presentation but allow your content to flow into other channels via RSS and other standards so your readers can read how they want to read.

Also, the separation of content from presentation/layout is absolutely critical when dealing with multiple screen sizes. Every content creator should be thinking about sooner rather than later.

It's been mentioned but tools like Flipboard and Flud bring content to me, where I am. Another tool I'm using, Zite, also recommends new content within the same type of context (in my case a magazine-like app on iPad). All this new content is aggregated through RSS and the experience would be impossible without it. So it's not only a matter of choosing the RSS feed over the website, but also discovering completely new content thanks to RSS.

Not including RSS, from a web management perspective, means you're not doing your job right. The benefits for SEO, reach and discovery way outweigh the cost . A user may not have the faintest idea about what RSS is, but will still benefit from it through other tools that utilize them.

I'll branch into a discussion where I recommend RSS tools. Let me know your favorites!

Definitely, the RSS are good filters to avoid the overwhelming task of just surf the web with no direction. And after you find something good, you can add them to your set of info sources. Information virtuous circle.

As a tool, Google Reader + Newsify (for iOS) work pretty good for me.