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Why do you like email more than RSS?

By Dominic Jones on April 14, 2008

  • Email

I WAS reviewing the latest traffic statistics for this blog this weekend and noticed that more than 70% of subscribers are getting updates via email instead of via our news feed.

So I’m wondering why this is so. If you’re getting the email updates, please tell me what is holding you back from using RSS instead.


Dominic Jones

Dominic (bio & disclosures) is IR Web Report‘s founder and an online investor relations consultant. He advises leading public companies and investor relations service providers worldwide on using the web for disclosure, engagement and profile building. You can contact him via the contacts page.

Posted in , | Tagged | 8 Responses

  • http://commetrics.com/?p=95 Weburs

    Why should I use RSS instead of getting your posts via e-mail. Do I want to get my day’s work interrupted several with an RSS feed or get your posts and read them when it fits my schedule?

    Incidentally, I can file your e-mailed posts and archive them. That is what I do, no so choice with RSS.

    Manging my time effectively means I cannot take you up on your offer, that simple. However, it also speaks for your blog that I want to archive your stuff. As well, your posts are so good, why should I care if they are a day late? Good material is timeless…. thanks for doing a good job.

  • http://www.irwebreport.com/ Dominic Jones

    Weburs,

    Your flattery will get you free emails as long as you want them. I just think from my perspective that RSS if more reliable. Email gets caught too easily in spam filters and such.

  • http://casescontact.org/tips/210008 WebUrs

    Salue Dominic

    See Tip 3 in the link outlining how to manage the spam filters:

    http://casescontact.org/tips/210008

    Managing spam filter correctly does help. And with Google / Gmail one can customize rules very nicely as explained here:

    http://blog.casescontact.org/?p=358

    Making a long story short, none of your e-mails have been identified as spam so far with any of our accounts and spam filters. So no complaints from my end.

    Thanks
    WebUrs

  • http://www.agoracom.com Agoracom

    Weburs, I would wholly agree with you if you were simply tracking Dominic and no other sources.

    However, the fact of the matter is that you are probably tracking multiple sources of great information – or will be in the very near future.

    As such, RSS feeds make a lot of sense because they allow you to amalgamate all of these sources in one central location – much like your own personal newspaper.

    Ironically, I wrote about this very subject for my clients last week:

    http://blog.agoracom.com/2008/04/08/small-cap-ceo-lesson-your-personal-business-newspaper-on-google/

    Secondly, if you are concerned about keeping the best clips organized, I would strongly recommend you begin using web-based bookmarking, which (as you can imagine) allows you to keep track of and access bookmarks from anywhere via the web, rather than your PC at work. I use the following:

    http://del.icio.us/about/

    As a result, I now have a powerful 2-step organizing system:

    1] RSS Feeds amalgamated into my “personal newspaper”

    2] Web-based bookmarking to which I add the best pieces for future reference.

    Hope this helps.

    Regards,
    George

  • http://www.irwebreport.com/ Dominic Jones

    Hey George,

    Good job explaining iGoogle. I should do more of that kind of thing here.

  • Pingback: Reading online news - reducing your biggest time waster

  • http://commetrics.com/?p=42 WebUrs

    Dominic and George

    Great points got me to think a bit more and put your points into one of mine. How to avoid wasting more time with online news :-)
    http://commetrics.com/?p=42

    What you think, would appreciate to get your comments and ideas about this. Thanks for sharing

  • Dominic

    WebUrs,

    A lot of different things in response to your post, so I’ll mention a few only:

    1. I use a free online RSS reader (Bloglines) that will keep up t0 200 new items per feed. Items I’m interested can be bookmarked in the reader. There’s no limit to number of items I can keep in a feed. I have some from three years ago. I’ve tried using a different feed reader (Google Reader, Newsgator) but I am comfortable with what I have.

    2. Some feeds I read every day, other’s once per month. RSS allows me to be selective. I have a lot of information to get through and I can’t imagine getting all of it in email. But I’m using RSS for research on a lot of different topics.

    3. On IR Web Report, we use the summary for the emails because of corporate spam filters. The more text we send, the higher the likelihood our emails will get filtered out. That’s because we quote other bloggers, use the word “blog” a lot, and use lots of links.

    4. Our RSS feed, however, is full text. If you use a desktop feed reader, you will have all of the items stored locally in full text.

    5. The biggest problem you’ve highlighted is bad website archiving practices. You’re right about bookmarks breaking when sites remove content. That’s why every URL should be permanent. Blogs are better than most websites in this respect because they are designed with permalinks. We have a policy of keeping our URLs indefinitely. This is very good for us in terms of search engine visibility.

    6. Like you, I use both email and RSS. I have email alerts set up for some topics that I also get via RSS. I find these are very useful and more intrusive than RSS. Consequently, I find I write about topics that come via email more than I write about topics that come via RSS. So email is an effective attention getter, if it gets through.