This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Think RSS is well known?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Think again. Here's a post that sums up how many average net readers view RSS:
I am not a technically proficient user. I don't know what XML, RSS, or even HTML stand for. I think the internet is the web, and the web is the internet. I still haven't figured out that I can dial up without having to click on the blue 'E' first.
When I see an orange button, I wonder what it does. I push it. A bunch of garbage text fills my screen, so I assume the button is broken. I don't push the useless button again, and resent it being there.
There are more people in this camp than you would like to imagine. As I said here, for most people a computer is an appliance - they use it to do some task. They don't want to know about protocols, file formats, or network issues any more than they want to worry about the technical differences between the AM band and the FM band. We (technologists) forget this, a lot. For the opposing bozo view on this, read this Guardian article