Perhaps the fundamental question behind all of this is “What do people use media for?”

I’m fortunate to be studying at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, and we’re in the process of setting up a special centre for media. The dean of the school, when he’s not having dinner with the Prince of Wales(!), identified three hot areas for the future: the management of professional service firms (lawyers, consultants, etc); social entrepeneurship (funded by a huge donation from Jeff Skoll of eBay); and media & comms.

I’m not entirely sure what the aims of our media centre will be, but the people involved are top notch so presumably they’ve got it all worked out.

I happen to know that consumption of RSS feeds is actually quite popular, in places where it’s made simple. On this site you’ll find an “add to My Yahoo!” button – one click, and you can keep track of what I post here (assuming you use My Yahoo!).

As for setting it up, the only reason I have RSS feeds is that they worked out of the box when I installed Movable Type.

This is why I argue that “Really Simple Syndication” is a good moniker – people will use it when it’s transparently simple, and the communication of that simplicity starts with what you call the technology.

As for the iPod, the moaning was me. And I agree, it won. For now. Possibly, in colloquial terms, “iPod” will be the generic term for portable mp3 players regardless of what competitors put out, much like all portable cassette players were popularly “Walkmen”, regardless of whether they were built by Sony. Apple had better hope not – that way Trademark dilution lies.

Personally, I currently have a Creative Zen Micro, because it has reliable battery life, it’s at least as pretty as the iPod, it’s proved easier to use than iPod/iTunes ever did, and it can play tunes from a multitude of subscription/purchase stores rather than tying me to iTMS.

I’m not going to get into DRM/format arguments here – that’s a whole other issue which is better explored elsewhere.

“The technology is irrelevant” is not a heresy around these parts – you’re more than welcome to say exactly what I argue on a near-weekly basis in the development communities I’m part of at work.

As for “technology or content”, the past 10 years have suggested that consumption of content drives technology. The first video compression and delivery mechanisms were picked up by pornographers as a way to disseminate their material more easily.

Over time, other video content came online, and two things happened – codecs were improved to increase quality, and broadband usage rose to cater for those who were consuming more of this high-bandwidth content.

Now we’ve reached a new plateau, where broadband usage is high enough to allow content like music downloads, online MMRPGs and film trailers/music videos to be distributed to a wide enough audience that money can be made.

In the next decade, we’ll probably see online streams/downloads of entire films starting to compete with physical distribution of rental DVDs, particularly as various companies gear up with their “media center”/”digital home” technologies, and package them in boxes which (here’s that point again) are as easy to use as “plug in, switch on”.

This will partly be a content issue (studios figuring out how to licence their content for the new platform), and partly technology (streaming long videos is still intriguing if you’ve got a lot of consumers, DRM will continue to evolve, and those home media centers really do need to be “plug and play”…)

As for traditional publishing and editing roles, well… The argument of the “blog/podcast/next-big-thing will kill mainstream media” crowd is that new technologies will allow people to become their own publishers/editors by choosing RSS feeds (or whatever).

I really don’t buy it though, for reasons already argued in another piece. To those arguments, I’ll add my complete agreement with your general point here – I really can’t be bothered to edit my own news.

I subscribe to RSS feeds from maybe 5 sources, and collate those on a single page which gives me a general overview of what’s going on. Setting this up was as simple as clicking a few links on web pages. But I still rely on the staff of those organisations to “pre-filter”, package and deliver the stories to me.

Because, frankly, I’ve got better things to do.

Thanks for your comments – I like the way you think!

What a lot of rot!

I’ve got a computer science degree, and I can’t be bothered to faff around with all this RSS and podcasting guff.

Somebody here was moaning that the iPod wasn’t the first or the best MP3 player. No, but guess what: it’s the one that most people *perceive* is the easiest to use, and the most compatible with everything else. And guess what else: it won! Marketing is all about perception, not reality. It’s about emotion, not logic. Guess what: people are *not* rational!

I used to be a techie, and now I’m doing an MBA, and all this marketing stuff is really interesting if you can see both sides of the coin. To my mind, the technology is actually *totally irrelevant* (heresy, surely!) and it’s the total customer experience that’s important (even though it sounds like buzzword bullsh*t!)

Don’t forget that almost any technology that’s going to be picked up by the masses has to be very simple – if people can’t program a VCR after 20 years then they’re not going to mess about with anything that requires technical skill to set up.

One of the big debates in media at the moment, certainly if the conferences that I go to are anything to go by (and they have big people there, so they should be) is this: what’s going to be driving media forward: technology or content? Admittedly this is a bit chicken-and-egg, and they probably will develop together. But I think a key point is this: there’s no point everyone being able to broadcast to the world if they haven’t got anything to say. That’s why publishers and editorial teams will continue to be important, in my view.

A particularly genius way of making the point.

Typical, that the best piece of “audioblogging” I’ve heard is a well-made argument against the entire practice….

That said, I actually think “Really simple syndication” is probably a better way of describing the purpose of RSS to the average punter who cares not what RDF is, why it’s not simple, or any other element of the technical details.

Whilst RSS is not intrinsically simple as a format, it has taken on a life where apps/sites like My Yahoo! and Firefox support it (and a whole host of others are dedicated to reading it). The upshot is that it’s very easy to get hold of diverse feeds from various sites. Joe News Consumer really doesn’t care how easy the stuff is to set up and create, as long as he can consume it.

As for the competing versions of RSS, well, I personally believe we should all use the one true RSS. 3.0 all the way, baby!

The initial term was RDF Site Summary, which necessarily implies the intent of RSS at the very beginning was not to be “simple,” as RDF is not simple. RDF is, however, intended to be extensible.

I would agree that this terrible crap Winer calls “RSS 2.0″ should not be so extensible, because that conflicts with its purpose, which is to be simple. But that is just one more reason not to use RSS 2.0.

My own music RSS feed at http://homepage.mac.com/pudge/tunes.rss is in RSS 1.0, with sane — though not simple! — enclosure semantics.