The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Quiet Period due to RSS Reader Column

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Was a bit quiet yesterday, blog-wise, concentrating on a column for ClickZ Experts on branded RSS newsreaders. Some interesting tidbits about the Consenda newsreader (which the L.A. Times and the Guardian are using) that didn’t fit into the piece:

  • It’s a downloadable application that integrates with the Internet Explorer browser, rather than a Web-based reader. (Doesn’t work with Firefox.)
  • Users launch it by clicking on a small “N” that appears on IE once it’s installed. It pops up as a small rectangular application, which can be expanded vertically but not horizontally. A news ticker featuring the latest headlines crawls across the top.
  • Embedded ads appear (on the LATimes.com version, anyway) when readers look at their lists of feeds, and when readers look at the feed items themselves (between entries — in the middle of the screen).
  • Consenda has a Web site that integrates with the reader, where users can subscribe to and search for feeds. It’s trying to make it easy for the average non-techie to use RSS without having to cut and paste URLS and such.

    Am not sure how I feel about the user interface. I tend to be a fan of Web-based newsreaders, as one can then access them from a variety of locations without being confronted with the same items more than once. Needless to say, the usability of RSS needs to be improved for it to be accessible to a mass audience, and it was interesting to see Consenda’s approach to accomplishing this.

    UPDATE: Forgot to mention that of course Newsgator announced a similar strategy yesterday. (Brad Feld’s post on it here.) Unfortunately the announcement came too late for me to add much about it into my column for today. Need to check it out.