The FIR Podcast Network Everything Feed FIR #475: Algorithms Got You Down? Get Retro with RSS!
It has been 12 years since Google shut down Google Reader, its popular RSS news reader. The rise of social media newsfeeds had rendered RSS useless for many people, and declining usage led Google to sunset it.
But RSS feeds never went away. Many websites still make them available; they’re baked into most blogging utilities; and podcasting relies heavily on RSS feeds for distribution of audio and video files.
As algorithms determine what you see in social networks, and newsletter subscriptions require visits to your inbox, where your newsletters are mixed in with all your other emails, RSS news readers are making a comeback. New news readers are emerging, and older ones are making improvements with a range of features, including the incorporation of AI to assist with sorting and other tasks.
In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel explore the benefits of RSS, examine some of the features of the latest crop of readers, and discuss how an RSS resurgence can benefit communicators.
Links from this episode:
The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, August 25.
We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email fircomments@gmail.com.
Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.
You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.
Raw Transcript:
Shel Holtz (00:01)
Hi everybody and welcome to episode number 475 of Four Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.
@nevillehobson (00:09)
and I’m Neville Hobson. At the dawn of blogging 25 years ago, RSS was a quiet revolution. It let anyone subscribe to a blog or a podcast and receive updates instantly. No gatekeepers, no ads, no algorithms deciding what you should see. Just a simple feed, delivering content directly to your reader of choice. Fast forward to today and the digital landscape could hardly be more different. Our online experiences are now shaped by social media algorithms.
filtered through engagement metrics and interrupted by endless distractions. Many people have never even heard of RSS and those who do often assume it’s long gone. But here’s the twist, it never went away. And according to writer and technologist Molly White, best known for her clear-eyed critiques of Web3 and crypto hype, RSS may be due for a comeback. We’ll take a look at this right after this message.
In a recent long form post titled Curate Your Own Newspaper with RSS, Molly makes the case for reclaiming this overlooked piece of internet plumbing. It’s part how-to guide, part manifesto. She walks through setting up a modern feed reader, finding hidden RSS feeds, and building a curated stream of blogs, news and newsletters that reflect your actual interests, not what some platform thinks will keep you scrolling. She even shares how she structures her own reading habits.
offering a kind of digital self-care routine for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the flood of content today. Reading it, I was struck by how radical RSS now feels, not because it’s new, but because it puts the user back in charge. It reminded me of the early blogosphere when independent voices flourished and content was shared freely through syndication. That original spirit of openness and autonomy is still there, waiting to be rediscovered. People are talking about an RSS comeback.
driven by digital fatigue and a yearning for direct ad-free content. The Reddit RSS subreddit remains active, with users debating RSS’s survival and sharing workarounds where publishers drop support. Worries persist, though, especially about publishers de-prioritizing RSS or hiding feeds. And tech ecosystems like podcasting and the Fediverse continue to depend on feed standards.
In a world increasingly centralized, RSS is decentralized. In a world designed to grab attention, it respects your time. And in the world of world gardens, keeps the door open. And here’s a great comment on Hacker News. We’ve been fed algorithmic garbage for so long, people are rediscovering how good a hand-picked feed of trusted sources can feel. So here’s a question for us to explore. What role could RSS play in communication today?
Could it help rebuild trust in a media environment dominated by algorithms? Could communicators use it to deliver information more transparently or to reconnect with audiences looking for more intentional, less manipulative content? And for internal communication, other ways to syndicate updates, insights, or thought leadership that sidestep the noisy channels employees often tune out. That’s one for you, Cheryl.
Shel Holtz (03:26)
I would love to see a resurgence of RSS. I was listening to a podcast interview over the weekend. It was all about the shift of journalism to Substack in particular, but they were also talking about, think it’s ⁓ Beekeeper is another one that, Beehive, right? And what they were talking about was the ability to get right into the user’s inbox without
@nevillehobson (03:44)
Beehives, beehives. Yeah.
Shel Holtz (03:55)
the intermediary of the algorithm getting in the way. And RSS does largely the same thing. And I think a lot of these people who are looking at subscription through newsletters might also consider ⁓ RSS feeds. There have been ongoing developments in RSS. One of the more exciting is how it’s being paired with artificial intelligence to make your feeds even smarter and more useful.
know, RSS typically just shows you the newest articles from your favorite sources and the order they were published. But now researchers and developers are combining RSS and large language models to help you discover the most relevant content in your feed without losing that control and privacy that makes RSS appealing in the first place. So instead of having to scroll endlessly through everything, your reader might highlight just a few items most relevant to your interests.
even if you’re new and haven’t given it much to go on. Another interesting development is what’s called content enrichment. Some of the new RSS readers are going beyond the bare minimum that RSS feeds typically deliver, which is a headline, link, and maybe a short blurb. Now, AI can step in and fill in the gaps. It can pull in the complete article text. It can pull in images. It can categorize topics. It can even write summaries for you.
So your RSS reader can give you something that looks and feels a lot more like a personalized news briefing. So these advances, I think, are really turning it into a more modern, intelligent way to stay informed on your terms without the algorithms. So if people can discover these new RSS news readers that really go…
beyond what we were accustomed to with the readers. mean, even thinking of ⁓ the Google News reader, the late lamented ⁓ Google News reader, which a lot of people said was going to kill RSS. Of course, that’s silly. RSS drives podcasting. So it’s not going anywhere. It really is plumbing. And I also found one site called RSS.app. Have you seen this? Yeah, I think it’s great. There are people who are worried
that the feeds are going away, that sites that offer them are going to stop offering them for one reason or another. But RSS app lets you create a feed for any site that’s publicly available. So if you want to add it to your news reader and it doesn’t have a news feed, RSS.app will fix that for you and give you an RSS feed from that site. So Edge and Chrome let you follow.
RSS feeds, ⁓ readers are evolving. I’m hopeful that this can just come back from the dead in a new, more modern iteration that solves a lot of problems for people.
@nevillehobson (06:58)
Yeah, I the RSS.app site, I tried it out about a year or so back and it was okay but I didn’t like the fact that to do anything meaningful you had to take the paid option and I didn’t feel I wanted to do that at all. So it’s not really didn’t ring any bells for me at all. But you know the interesting thing, Shell, think, listening to what you’re saying, going back, you know, back in the day, 25 years ago,
we were all talking about RSS. it was kind of like ⁓ it’s a jargony word. It’s very tech oriented and trying to explain to people. I remember conversations a lot ⁓ to look at the, you know, there’s no single definition of what the letters stand for. Really simple syndication was the one that stuck out. I would suggest if anyone listening doesn’t know what it go to Wikipedia and look it up on RSS. The page is
not well written, it’ll tell you what it is. Today, ⁓ most people who ⁓ I would argue most is the right word, haven’t heard of RSS, what they do, they could care less what it is. But you mentioned something which I think is quite significant, which is indeed what Molly White mentioned, the internet plumbing. This is part of the plumbing. Newsletters.
podcasts, videos, you name it, that people subscribe to. They get it in their feed, in their ⁓ player on their mobile phone or whatever it is. RSS plays a big role in getting that content to them. So the interesting thing to me, certainly, is that we don’t talk about RSS. Yeah, it’s there. It’s the plumbing, like electricity. So I found it interesting what you said about AI, because therein, to me, lies the key to this.
which is that ⁓ we aren’t going to talk or sell the idea to anyone about AI is going to sort out your RSS fee. No, no, no, no. AI is going to be part of the solution getting you the content you want when you want it or however you happen to what you want to do with it, distribute it or whatever it is. And don’t worry about what it’s called. And that’s where we didn’t go the right way with all this back in the original days because people got so wrapped up in the tech.
that the glazed eye syndrome was huge in organization. We tried to explain to them, hey, we should do RSS. mean, no one’s going to say that now. But that could well be the route for this. ⁓ Although I’m just thinking, what is the unique thing about this? You mentioned, I mean, the tech concept of RSS in how it enables things like enclosures, which is the MP3 file for a podcast, instance.
How would that work, I wonder? Is there anything that would need to be changed in how it does what it does if AI is playing a role? I can’t see how that would be changed because it’s not changing the technology per se. It’s actually automating the process for you. Is that the route? Molly doesn’t mention that in a big way in her article, but this I think is worth exploring. What role could RSS play in communication today?
And maybe that’s not the right question, actually. Maybe that’s not it. ⁓ Does it offer something today? And this is a question. I don’t have the answer to this. That anything else that’s in use today to deliver content to people can’t do as well as RSS can. I don’t know the answer to that, but I doubt that would be the case. So I stopped using a dedicated RSS reader a long time ago because ⁓ I’ve actually switched largely.
to subscribing to content I like by newsletter more than any other means. So I used to use a really good reader called InnoReader, which has a free version and a paid one. I used a paid one for some years, but it then got for me, certainly, a little too much, too much, too many bells and whistles. All I wanted was something quite simple. I’ve got that now, for instance, with ⁓ Raindrop, which is the replacement to Pocket.
the read it later tool really, really useful. I find raindrop make sure I got the name right. It is raindrop, isn’t it? Yeah, raindrop.io. Excellent. They’ve got a free version and a paid version. And I’m on the free because I don’t need the page because the features on free are really, really good. You can use it adding as much or as little as you want. You can tag it, you can add descriptions, you can categorize it.
I don’t do any of that because I have literally a handful of tags I use for everything I save there. And it’s really, really good. It got me thinking, how does that deliver the content? I bet you RSS is in there somewhere. So there are tools around if you want to think about subscribing in that kind of manual way and it’s using RSS. I’m not sure that’s how we should as communicators be pitching this idea to anyone. So ⁓ yeah, so the idea of AI.
Shel Holtz (12:06)
no. ⁓
@nevillehobson (12:10)
So AI agents, for instance, you’ll have an agent whose job is to sort this out, to organize this in the best way possible to get that piece of content or whatever it might be to this audience in your organization, whether it’s employees, whether it’s customers, doesn’t matter. And if it uses RSS to do it, great. But if it doesn’t, who cares? As long as you get your content. I mean, is that being too radical, do you think?
Shel Holtz (12:34)
Well, yeah, I think there’s a real conundrum here for anybody who wants to try to capture this market. The readers that are emerging with these new features and ⁓ designed to appeal to a new audience, they have names like RSS Guard and quite RSS. And then there’s RSS.app and
@nevillehobson (12:39)
Yeah.
Shel Holtz (12:58)
they’ve got RSS in the name and that’s going to be a turnoff to a lot of people. But for people who are looking for an RSS news reader, that’s what they’re looking for. So how do you attract a whole new audience to something that doesn’t care? I mean, the audience doesn’t care about RSS or this technology. You’re off. There’s a value proposition. So there needs to be a way for somebody who has one of these great tools to market it so that people.
start talking about it as this alternative to scrolling through social media where I’m being controlled by the algorithm and being manipulated to doom scroll and stay on their platform as opposed to seeing content that I really want to see because I subscribe to it. So I think that’s the challenge. ⁓ It’s not like there’s no feeds out there. There are plenty of sites to still maintain feeds. Even in the U.S. government, I was reading that NASA
@nevillehobson (13:46)
Yeah, I agree.
Shel Holtz (13:56)
and the US Department of Agriculture still offer RSS feeds. I know that there are plenty of them out there for trade publications because I use an RSS feed to pull in construction headlines on our internal communications. It’s all RSS. I think I’m using construction dives, RSS feed. So they’re out there and you have the ability to make them where they don’t exist. I think it’s a matter of
somebody really enticing the public to start using this as a way to get the content that they’re interested in and not mention what the technology is or how it works. Because if people had, and I use this analogy way too often,
But if everybody had to know what the name of everything that makes their cargo was and how it works, nobody get in their cars. We don’t need that understanding of the technology in order to drive from point A to point B.
@nevillehobson (14:58)
is true.
I agree. I’m not sure myself that this is even the right argument to be discussing about should we, know, is RSS going to have a comeback? In the sense of how Molly White writes her long form article, that’s very much geared to ⁓ the folks who want to know about the technology per se. Normal people don’t want to do that.
not being disparaging here. That’s a reality. So maybe the route to explore thinking of this now from the communicator’s point of view, whether it’s internal or external matter, is not about how do we bring RSS back and what role could RSS play. That’s not the key argument. That’s part of the secondary argument once you’ve defined the role that you want whatever the technology you’re to use to help you achieve the goal you’ve set.
That to me is very much in the area of an artificial intelligence agent to do that. I haven’t really started experimenting with agents, mainly because most of the tools that offer them are only literally now become, you can start using them here in the UK. So, ChatGPT’s agents just become available in the last couple of weeks. I’ve got it in my thing. I’ve just not had time to do anything with it yet, other than read up about it. But I’m wondering, I might do an experiment.
mainly to help me decide is this worth spending any time on which is to tell it to create something where RSS plays a role and see what it does. Don’t know how I’m going to do that yet but I’ll get to it.
Shel Holtz (16:39)
You could even vibe code your own R-Accessorator that does exactly what you want it to. No reason why not these days. By the way, I did use an agent, the ChatGPT agent that has been available here for a little while. I told it to go to my company’s website and look at the markets where we work, study our areas of subject matter expertise, get a good sense of who we are.
@nevillehobson (16:43)
Right, I might get into that. No.
It has, yeah.
Shel Holtz (17:05)
Then go find all of the podcasts in the construction industry, architecture, engineering, and also in the markets that we serve, like healthcare and aviation, for example, to find those podcasts where we would have the opportunity to pitch our subject matter experts and then find out if on their website they have any information about pitching interview guests.
and then create a spreadsheet that categorizes these podcasts based on industry or market and include in the spreadsheet the name of the podcast, its URL, which focus it has, and what information they were able to extract on pitching guests. And I just sat back and watched while it did all of this. It stopped and asked me a question once.
I don’t remember what question, but once it asked me a question and then it went off on its merry way until there was a spreadsheet with about 25 podcasts listed on it. That would have taken an intern two days.
@nevillehobson (18:08)
Yeah, that’s interesting. mean, that’s exactly the kind of thing I think that, again, to our point about what role could RSS play in communication for the communicates, what would you use this for? That’s not the right question. So ⁓ unless it’s important to you or your audience that they know it’s RSS doing something in there, but I don’t think that won’t be common. ⁓ How could this play a role for those who need to know that?
And I think that’s the right question to be asking.
Shel Holtz (18:39)
Yeah, I think the thing for communicators to do at this point is lobby to maintain RSS feeds on their websites or lobby to establish them if they’re not there and keep an eye on this. And if you see developments in RSS that warrant more of your attention, whether that’s making your feeds ⁓ more visible on your website and promoting their availability or
pitching a particular reader to people because it benefits your content in a good way. ⁓ Just keep an eye on it because there seems to be something happening here. Neville, when you shared on our Slack channel that this was the topic for the day, I went and did some search on new developments in RSS. And there’s a ton. There is a ton of material out there on this. So something is afoot.
@nevillehobson (19:35)
So then in that case, the answer to that question, the first answer to that question is what you’ve just said. Be aware of what’s going on, find out how this is evolving, and that’s understanding how the landscape is developing. And from there, you can determine what your next steps might be. But that seems to me to be good starting point.
Shel Holtz (19:55)
And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release
The post FIR #475: Algorithms Got You Down? Get Retro with RSS! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.