Johnny Angel's Tech Media Blog

CRN's Michael Vizard on RSS

This is part of an interview I did that was published yesterday in Technology Marketing's electronic newsletter. Michael Vizard, editor-in-chief of CRN (who formerly occupied the same role at InfoWorld)) on RSS:

TM: As regular readers know, I'm very intrigued by RSS, and other things that fall under the category of non-Web methods of information delivery. That could also include newsletters, Zinio Reader editions and a lot more. How key is all this going to be for CRN?

MV: I think it's pretty key! It takes two forms. One is Web logs, which are essentially personal journals, aka columns, on the Web. That becomes a mechanism by which thought leaders start to share ideas and notions back and forth with each other in a way that transcends the limited nature of a print audience. This is the next generation of how opinions are manifested on the Web.

Web logs are interesting, but what's even more interesting is the RSS technology. Now, I've got a mechanism by which I can let people customize how they want to have information come to them. One of the things you've seen happening on CRN.com is that we're creating an RSS feed around storage. That's my first experiment with getting people to sign up for it. People can have a storage feed and get all the related headlines coming to them.

Once they get the headlines, they click on them and it takes them back to our site. It becomes a mechanism for driving traffic to the site that is phenomenal. It also is a beautiful thing for readers, because it allows them to customize content in accord with what they're looking for.

TM: Is there a down side to the RSS feeds in that people will read them, but maybe not come to the site?

MV: Right now, we're not shipping out whole stories via RSS. People want tight, limited summaries in an RSS feed, but will come to the site to read the stories. They use it as a digest and index to what's going on, but at the end of the day it will actually drive more traffic to the sites.

I think RSS means that people will move from the days of active Web surfing to passive Web surfing. By that I mean that people will no longer go on the site because it's fun, they'll only go when they have some specific thing that they care about. The RSS feed is a way to bring people back to sites for stuff that they care about it.

At the same time, people will find Web sites richer because they'll find them easier to navigate. I don't care whose site it is -- aggregating any site's content these days is a difficult chore because there's so much of it. RSS gives people a point of entry into the site for things they care about. I think that it will actually rejuvenate content on the Web. We could also have a much longer conversation about how RSS and e-mail will leverage and extend and improve each other.

Posted by Jonathan Angel at July 8, 2003 03:10 PM