that building a marketing site without including RSS feeds should be a firing offense, and today he updated his post with links to comments from a couple of Jupiter analysts: Eric Peterson and Michael Gartenberg.
I mostly agree with Scoble, but I think he’s expressing it backwards. The point isn’t to have RSS, period, the point is to quit building boring, static sites – sites that frankly aren’t a good fit for RSS. After all, a static site with RSS but no updates doesn’t really make a blip in any newsreader until it updates. Static site = nothing new to come down the RSS pipe = site that few will notice or care about.
So rather than insisting that sites need RSS, I think it’s more useful to suggest that marketing sites should include at least a small dynamic, regularly updating component and hopefully quite a bit more. In that context, to leave out an RSS feed is ridiculous. But it’s not about the feed, primarily, but about the content on the site in the first place.
[Note: I posted virtually the same thing already in the comments at Dave Winer’s RSS site]
Robert Scoble says
Agreed!
Which is why I got mad at the marketing guy before I even knew anything about the site.
Not having RSS is a symptom, not the disease.
Michael says
I hate it when some marketing guys give other marketing guys a bad name. A marketing guy (or woman, of course) who doesn’t know the web, from a strategic perspective? Not much of a marketer.