Tuesday, April 30, 2013; 4:12:17 PM Eastern
Pando depends on its feed
- I subscribe to Pando, along with several hundred other feeds in my personal river.
- http://tabs.mediahackers.org/?panel=dave
- I click on one link in 100, and I post one or two a year to my linkblog.
- If they improved the quality of their posts, I'd push more of their links. I don't have the largest reader base on the Internet, but I am part of a chain that pushes lots of info and ideas around the net. If you drew a net of the people who follow me and who follow them, it would be pretty damn large.
I use RSS because it means I can pay attention to more stuff. If for some reason Pando deleted their feed, I would almost never see a link to one of their stories. The other people I follow, and I follow a lot of people, don't seem to know they exist. It's a very small publication, relative to the size of others like The Verge, Mashable, Engadget, TechCrunch, etc. - Last night Pando ran a piece where they suggested that we "retire" RSS when Google Reader shuts down in July. This was hopefully the last gasp of a malicious thread started by Mike Arrington and repeated by his fanboys, many times over the last couple of years. Their promotion of this idea was out of nowhere, had nothing to do with anything that was actually happening. If they were right, the passing of Google Reader would have happened without any protest. I suppose it's wishful thinking on Google's part that we depended on them to sustain RSS. When the dust settles, I think we'll see that they were stifling RSS. When competiton enters the picture, when lock-in is no longer an option (and that dies with Google on July 1), we will see the market pick up where it left off before Google entered.
- So to the extent that there was any thought behind Arrington's rants about RSS, it was incorrect thought. He misunderstood what was going on. And the people who echoed his mantra were equally clueless.