Via Rebecca Lieb through ClickZ: “RSS is going mainstream. It holds myriad drawbacks for publishers and marketers, but all are surmountable. As with most everything else online, it comes down to the user. Increasingly more user-friendly RSS readers are becoming available (especially for tech-savvy and at-work surfers). Comfort levels are rising — this is pretty easy technology.”

Overall, this was a pretty good article - although it feels parroted. It’s important to bring your audience up-to-speed on the revolution, but if you intend on sharing the article with the rest of the world, offer a few suggestions, personal thoughts, wishes, hopes, et cetera. My only beef with Rebecca’s write-up was this section in particular…

[Headlines] aren’t stored for later in an inbox, should a reader be offline or busy when they’re live. There’s no RSS tracking mechanism, so you don’t know how many readers you’ve got or how many ads were served via RSS. If newsletter subscribers decamp in favor of feeds, publishers will have to explain lower subscriber numbers to advertisers.

(1) Most likely, headlines lead to Web-based articles - and when that’s the case, an online archive should exist for any content you may have missed. If not, there’s always Feedster or Syndic8 at your disposal. The truly paranoid could easily schedule their aggregator to collect new content automatically every few hours. (2) As far as a tracking mechanism is concerned: you can extract just as much user data from a feed as you can a Web page or e-mail newsletter. (3) If you can’t figure out how many ads were served via RSS, then perhaps it’s time to hire a different programmer?

(4) Lower subscriber numbers? EXCUSE ME?! Just last night, we had to review our open inventory for a site-wide campaign. Bits & Bytes: 33,000 e-mail subscribers, 720,000 unique RSS subscribers. The other newsletter numbers were just as staggering. The only thing THIS publisher is going to explain to his advertisers? It doesn’t matter HOW my audience sees a sponsor’s message - as long as they see it. 33k with filters in place versus 720k with no filters. You do the math.