Explaining RSS to the unaware(which means everyone)

In a meeting the other day, it occurred to me that trying to describe RSS in a straightforward way to those unfamiliar with its benefits is not the easiest thing to do.

Usually I will start with a description of its advantages, such as "content consumers can choose the newsfeeds they want to subscribe to and have the updates pushed out to something called a feedreader. "

Then I realize the term newsfeed and feedreader are foreign to most in the room as well. So I usually backtrack to a real world example: magazines. I tell the group or individual that it is like subscribing to a magazine, but instead of a magazine you get specialized pieces of content in a reader.

Usually, most people are excited about the possibility when they grasp it remotely, but according to mStoner's recent entry, almost NOBODY knows what RSS is. I encourage everyone to read his posts, because he beat me to the punch with many of his thoughts on this matter. Sure they may use a portal page such as myYahoo! that uses RSS feeds, but the average users have no idea where that content is coming from.

Sometimes I resort to saying, "it's easy to understand once you use it a bit", and let them know that they can download many browser plugins such as Sage to begin utilizing RSS. But what are the chances they will take time out of their life to do this!

On the plus side, RSS functionality has been added into the students' webmail package here on campus. As Michael Stoner said in his post(I am paraphrasing here), add RSS to my e-mail client, and then maybe we can see some adoption.

I really hope so, it would be a shame to have such a great, simple technology go to waste and die an early death because of low usage across the general population.