Today Yahoo introduced beta trial of RSS news feeds into its popular yahoo webmail. Yahoo has made RSS available since early 2004. But making RSS available for its >250m email users will vault RSS from the techie world into mainstream. If Yahoo can popularize RSS through this endeavor, this will be a landmark event, marking beginning of death of the newspapers.
Getting news from newspaper is so inefficient. First of all, you don't get to choose what you want to read. Many parts of the newspaper you probably have never read. Yet you have to spent the time to flip through the pages. It is such a waste of time. Second, you don't get news in real time. You get stale "news" from yesterday. Third, you can't get all you want from a single newspaper, because it is so full of junk that it does not have enough space for really valuable stuff.
RSS will change all that. By subscribing to RSS feeds, you get the news that you want in REAL TIME. You don't have to wade through the junk that you are never interested in reading. You get to choose what you want to read. It is completely "Personalized News", just for you.
It baffles me that the newspaper companies don't get it. They are so wed to the newsPAPER business and forgot that they are really in NEWS business, not the paper business. Paper is just one of the media for news distribution. It happens to be the very inefficient way, being replaced by the more efficient Internet.
The newspaper companies guard their content so closely, and don't want to make it freely available on the net. That is so short-sighted. I can understand charging a fee for newspaper, because there is printing the distribution costs. But why charge for distributing news online, where there is almost no cost in distribution, and ad-based business model should suffice?
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