RSS for Everyone?

RSS feeds changed my life. They are the best way to retrieve information on a daily basis from multiple sources of information. Everybody knows that I guess... or do they?

Even though RSS feeds have been around for a long time, their potential has not been fully utilized today. One of the reason for this is that whatever easy we believe, as heavy Internet users, it is to use RSS or to understand the logic behind, well it is not. I was transferring all my feeds this afternoon from MyYahoo to NetVibes, as I think NetVibes offers more flexibility for me to build my own "stay-in-touch-with-the-World" page. It took me hell of a lot of time... adding all the feeds and very often having to copy/paste RSS feeds URLs. And I am not even talking about finding new feeds here.

Talking about my dad again...
I am sorry that I will mention my dad again. Not that I have a fixation on him, but while he was visiting Hong Kong I gave him am Internet crash course! I decided to show him the power of the Internet and how it could change his way of working. Some stuff freaked him out, like being able to find pictures of the house he just bought in a tiny village in the South-East of France on Flickr. Others amazed him like the amount of information that can be found on Wikipedia. But above all, he felt most enthusiastic about RSS feeds and how it could help him save so much time... save time, that is once you have everything set up.

All this takes so much time
And that's where for me the major problem is. To be able to make an efficient use of RSS feeds, well on top of being very comfortable with all that Internet stuff, you have to have so much time. There is so much information out there that finding really interesting content is really a challenge, especially for the generation of people who did not grow up browsing the Web before they could speak. And this segment of the population is in dire need for information, as they hold position of major responsibility in multinationals for example.

Bloomberg for everybody
So, if we look at how things work in the Financial world, where Bloomberg and others feed real-time information to traders around the World. Wouldn't a concept like that nowadays work with general information where users could choose to be informed about special topics of interest? As many Web sites do it, it is great to leave it to the community to decide what is interesting, but for people with little Internet experience and little time, the task of choosing the type of content that is interesting to them could be left to one or several experts.

Following Pandora concept
A Web site that has nothing to do with information but that I find so great is Pandora, where the system builds a radio suited to your own taste, just based on the name of a band or a song that you provide. When a song comes up, you can just say that you like it or not and the system will tailor further the radio. It is that kind of simplicity that could make to my mind RSS feeds and information providers reach their full potential. Of course Pandora is a huge initiative that necessitates to review and categorize every piece of music that can be found. Could that be done with information? My feeling is that leaving an algorithm and the whole community do it may not be enough... and may leave out a part of the population who would be avid users is they were given the opportunity to try.