Almost 2 years ago, I mentioned to some folks at Google that they should rethink their branding of Google Reader. For those who don’t use it, Google Reader is their RSS product (and, by far, the best on the market). Most of the people I know don’t understand or use RSS, and I’ve been dumbfounded that RSS hasn’t caught on more. Especially since it’s been one of my favorite uses of the Internet for the past few years. It’s an amazing way to get news from hundreds of sources pushed to you, that you access whenever you want. It’s incredibly efficient and elegant. And so, I couldn’t resist begging that Google rebrand it as “Google Newspaper.” Why because my RSS feed is really my daily newspaper assembled on the fly with all of the stories pushed to me that I’m interested in. Everyone’s newspaper is unique to them and made just for them. I thought this was a pretty simple way of explaining how it worked.
Anyway, I thought of this today when I saw in the Times that someone is actually printing blog entries on newspaper print and selling ads. It’s sort of coming true.
Learn more about Google Newspaper…ahem…Google Reader…and get started here. Make sure you sign-up for my blog’s feed to get you started 🙂
(Yeah, I do get that since everyone is accusing Google of killing old media, that this likely wouldn’t make them any friends in print. But details, details.)
i've always described RSS as "an inbox for your blogs/news."
then, i found this, and it made sense to my parents:
http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english