The RSS Orange Crush

Last week I met with Scott Gatz from Yahoo. He heads up personalization at Yahoo. Scott said something interesting: millions of My Yahoo users are subscribing to RSS feeds, but they don't even realize it. They're simply searching for the content they're interested in and adding it to their personalized page. They could care less about RSS and they don't know it from Atom, er I mean Adam. So if that's the case why do we need the word RSS? Doesn't "subscribe" nail it? There are different views here. 25 times in a single story. Of course, the tech vendors are all talking up RSS. They love acronyms. decked out in so much orange and white for Gnomedex that they reminded me of the of the 1970s and 80s. I am in Coursey's camp. The aggregators should be pushing the subscribe message rather than saying "hey you can get RSS feeds." This is where I think Reader Comments... Senior Vice President with Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.