You know you’re in Geeksville when…
…it takes a whole page to explain how to get the news delivered to you.
Back in the old world, people come to my door and want to start delivering a newspaper. To make this happen, I don’t have to do anything but sit down to dinner. If I wanted to have news delivered to my door every day, I would not have to read about RSS and XML. I would only have to agree to pay them money.
The newspaper would give me yesterday’s news, of course. That would be the same news I would have seen on the evening news shows, if I watched them. They would just give me the same news I read on Yahoo that morning. But if I did want to watch the evening news, I would need no instructions. Except maybe where to find the remote.
That brings me to a helpful blog: Why Aren't You Using RSS? If you want to know how to start using RSS, this blog provides readable instructions in a page.
I think the answer most people give to a question like that is, “I have to want something really bad before I will read a page of instructions on how to get it.”
What does this story have to do with brain-based communication? Or with homework? That page of instructions is a lot like homework. Except that there is no teacher to make people read it.
So what does get people to read it? Or what keeps people from reading it? Start with simple economics. Cost-benefit. Or better yet, benefit-cost. If you don’t see a benefit, you don’t care about the cost. As the blog points out, the benefit of RSS is convenience in getting web content. Automatic delivery. Like subscriptions to magazines.
So how much benefit? A little convenience, if you routinely get a number of things from the web. What’s the cost? Whatever time it takes to read the instructions and carry them out. So the answer to the question is obvious: If I am not using RSS, it is because the inconvenience of figuring out how to set it up looks bigger to me than the convenience if would provide. The best way to change that equation is to make the set-up easier and the instruction shorter.
Now I am half geek, so I do use RSS. But I did wait till the equation looked good to me. I started with Pluck, a feed manager that was adequately developed. But then Yahoo included RSS in its My Yahoo pages. Since I was already using My Yahoo, I could add RSS feeds with the same operations I had already used to add AP news feeds. Nothing new to figure out. No pages of instruction.
And no explanation needed. I want “World of Psychology” (Blog by John Grohol) for the same reason that I want the AP World News feed. In My Yahoo, I get both in the same way, by clicking on “Add Content.”
If I weren’t half geek, I probably would not know that I was using RSS. And I probably would not notice that I had left Geeksville.
Back in the old world, people come to my door and want to start delivering a newspaper. To make this happen, I don’t have to do anything but sit down to dinner. If I wanted to have news delivered to my door every day, I would not have to read about RSS and XML. I would only have to agree to pay them money.
The newspaper would give me yesterday’s news, of course. That would be the same news I would have seen on the evening news shows, if I watched them. They would just give me the same news I read on Yahoo that morning. But if I did want to watch the evening news, I would need no instructions. Except maybe where to find the remote.
That brings me to a helpful blog: Why Aren't You Using RSS? If you want to know how to start using RSS, this blog provides readable instructions in a page.
I think the answer most people give to a question like that is, “I have to want something really bad before I will read a page of instructions on how to get it.”
What does this story have to do with brain-based communication? Or with homework? That page of instructions is a lot like homework. Except that there is no teacher to make people read it.
So what does get people to read it? Or what keeps people from reading it? Start with simple economics. Cost-benefit. Or better yet, benefit-cost. If you don’t see a benefit, you don’t care about the cost. As the blog points out, the benefit of RSS is convenience in getting web content. Automatic delivery. Like subscriptions to magazines.
So how much benefit? A little convenience, if you routinely get a number of things from the web. What’s the cost? Whatever time it takes to read the instructions and carry them out. So the answer to the question is obvious: If I am not using RSS, it is because the inconvenience of figuring out how to set it up looks bigger to me than the convenience if would provide. The best way to change that equation is to make the set-up easier and the instruction shorter.
Now I am half geek, so I do use RSS. But I did wait till the equation looked good to me. I started with Pluck, a feed manager that was adequately developed. But then Yahoo included RSS in its My Yahoo pages. Since I was already using My Yahoo, I could add RSS feeds with the same operations I had already used to add AP news feeds. Nothing new to figure out. No pages of instruction.
And no explanation needed. I want “World of Psychology” (Blog by John Grohol) for the same reason that I want the AP World News feed. In My Yahoo, I get both in the same way, by clicking on “Add Content.”
If I weren’t half geek, I probably would not know that I was using RSS. And I probably would not notice that I had left Geeksville.
posted by Selby Evans at 3:22 PM
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