RSS Feed Newsletters

As we head into the email newsletter week of this course, it seems like a good time to breach a topic I've been thinking about for a bit. When Safari 2.0 came out with the new Mac operating system, it was the first time I'd ever really used an RSS feed (RSS funtionality is built into the browser). My dabbling turned into very heavy usage as this class started and I began reading the RSS feeds for 30-odd blogs, switched to NetNewsReader Lite, and have since heavily relied on RSS readers instead of cycling through most of the sites I read every day.

While RSS feeds work great for blogs, they can be a bit unwieldy for larger sites like most of the major newspapers. Many of the major newspapers are hopping on the RSS bandwagon, breaking up their different sections into different feeds, and the Washington Post even offers RSS feeds for just about every columnist that writes for either the dead tree or online versions of the paper (by far the best RSS offering that I've seen).

This is ultimately a long-winded way of saying that I think campaigns could take advantage of RSS feeds in order to distribute content to users as they do through email newsletters. Obviously, the email newsletter will remain the primary vehicle for such information distribution, if only because the installed base is orders of magnitudes larger (I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I had never used an RSS feed until just a few months ago). That said, why not offer RSS feeds in addition to email newsletters?

Using RSS would also allow campaigns to create more targeted RSS feeds, following the good advice that Peter gave the other day. In the same way that newsletters can and should be customized to better interact with voters' interests, different RSS feeds can be offered to better sync with the content users actually want.

It would probably take a relatively large campaign to take advantage of splitting content into different RSS feeds, as it seems some campaigns have enough trouble creating enough content to fit even one such feed. But as RSS readers become more popular (and I think they will since it is such great technology), it's certainly seems like an avenue for content distribution that campaigns should look into.

Some voters may prefer not to give out their email and prefer getting serialized content through an RSS feed, so why not allow them to do so if they'd otherwise not get the content at all? Who knows, they could be opinion leaders, and it would be a shame for them to lose touch with the campaign simply because they've had bad experiences with email newsletters in the past.