RSS for Kids

"Interestingly, RSS also has the potential to route around some of the personal information issues that come with collecting and using email addresses....

What next? I think there's a lot of potential for giving child-safe news, search and directories the RSS treatment. Many parents only let their children navigate to sites they've already bookmarked together. Perhaps a daily stream of sites recently added to CBBC Search and the Yahooligans directory, combined with quality news sources (National Geographic Kids, CBBC newsround...), would give kids that much more to explore. Combine this with a facility for their parents, teachers and friends to bookmark their own finds (a kind of semi-private del.icio.us), and you've got an information-rich, safe, social space for children." [foe romeo, via Technorati search results for The Shifted Librarian]

Commerce to Drive Mass Adoption of RSS

"I had an interesting discussion with two of my co-workers yesterday. We all use FeedDemon and are getting addicted to our many RSS news feeds. We find RSS particularly valuable for monitoring client, industry news and what the media is covering in general. One of my colleagues asked me a couple of really good questions: 'Why doesn't everyone use this stuff? Why is it that when we talk about RSS we get blank stares?'

The truth is, for all the hype about RSS, it's still trapped in geekland. It's moving mainstream, but it is taking time. So, what will it take for RSS to reach a tipping point? The answer is not mass adoption by news outlets, but mass adoption by b-to-b and b-to-c e-commerce sites....

RSS today feels like the Web 1994. The geeks have long caught on. The big tech sites all have RSS feeds and increasingly, so do mainstream news outlets like Time magazine and others. Media coverage of RSS is also rising, yet overall awareness is still low. So, here's the trend to watch: commerce sites will increasingly find creative ways to use RSS feeds to alert customers and drive sales. Amazon and eBay are already on board. Brokerage sites like Schwab, bill payment/bank Web sites, retailers, major manufacturers, real estate brokers and others will all soon follow. Hopefully newspapers will recognize the opportunity here too by making their classified ads available via RSS. You can bet that MSN, Google and Yahoo are already thinking about building RSS feeds into their shopping sites.

In short, mass adoption of RSS will begin once consumers realize they can use the technology to easily find items they want to buy and sell. News via RSS, in and of itself, won't do the trick, but it certainly does help." [Micro Persuasion, via Scripting News]

It's amazing how similar this conversation is to the one I had with the reporter yesterday. Steve is right about how RSS goes mainstream - and it won't be called RSS on those sites when it does - and it's why libraries need to start providing their own information via this format.