BusinessWeek just published a cover story titled “Blogs Will Change Your Business“, as I’m sure you’ll be reading on “hundreds” of blogs today.

While BusinessWeek takes a deep and meaningful look at how blogs are changing the business and publishing landscape, what got my interest is their take on RSS.

“In time, aggregators could turn the Web on its head. Why? They discourage surfing as users increasingly just wait for interesting items to drop onto their page or e-mailbox. Internet advertising, which traditionally counts on page views and clicks, could be thrown for a loop. Already Yahoo is packaging ads on the feeds. Google is testing the waters.”

I’m not quite certain it’s going to be that easy, at least with the aggregators available today. Granted, they do say “in time”, so technology advancements are a given.

The problem, as already noted, is the ease with which people subscribe to RSS feeds and unsubscribe from them.

The RSS subscription model facilitates impulse and rapid subscriptions: you see it, you like it, you subscribe. Actually, you visit a site, you remotely like its content, you don’t have the time to read it all today, you yubscribe to the feed and then forget about it. Repeat excercise.

It’s so easy and quick that people add new feeds to their aggregators without giving it a second thought.

And it’s so easy to unsubscribe that people actually rarely do it. Why do it now; it’s so easy that you can do it anytime; but you just don’t.

From this viewpoint, RSS doesn’t take the content overload away, but rather ads to it.

With e-mail subscriptions, people at least think for a second before subscribing; because they don’t want more e-mail; because it’s difficult to unsubscibe and because it takes more than a second.

Sooner or later, RSS end-users as well will be overloaded with RSS content.

And if RSS is really to turn the Web on its head, the tools that filter content first need to evolve.

But before such filters evolve, it just might be easier for end-users to watch their key content sources via the Web, as long as these are limited in number. And in fact they often are …

via MarketingStudies.net