Yes, this is a little disturbing. But not to fret, it appears that we have yet another case of someone who still doesn’t quite get it (not referring to Scott, by the way). It’s really simple: If the feeds are seamlessly delivered, people will be more than happy to read the delivered content.

From David Weinberger’s report on a panel at an Annenberg Center conference, I find Martin Nisenholtz of New York Times Digital making the following statement (I’m trusting David’s report of the words, but they’re notes, not a news article):

“Our research says that a relatively small group of people want to aggregate RSS feeds.”

I don’t doubt that the Times has such research, and that it is an accurate snapshot of current Net user desire. But it’s a bad predictor, because when you ask most Net users, “Do you want to aggregate RSS feeds?” their likely answer is, “Huh? Aggregate what?”

Imagine it’s, say, 1995, when a lot of us early adopters were already spending tons of time online but much of the world barely knew the Web existed or how it worked. And imagine you did research then that asked people, “Do you want to access Web pages with HTTP?”

Such research would have shown that a “relatively small group of people” wanted to surf the Web. And that research would have guided you in precisely the wrong direction. Source: Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment