I had an fascinating discussion today with one of the company librarians. We were discusssing why Factiva was so popular here and the barriers to making RSS feeds a standard way of receiving news. Our talk came to an interesting conclusion: People don’t want to spend time thinking about the quality of the news they receive. They want someone in our library to evaluate incoming news and feed them content.
We talked through the other barriers to RSS:
- setting up accounts on readers
- limited (compared to Factiva) news sources
- lack of archival content
- the potential havoc of screening ads
- lack of keyword filtering
and realized that all of these things could be overcome with time or training. The thing that couldn’t be overcome was laziness.
I have a hard time with the conclusion, but I know it’s true. There aren’t enough people who are interested in the quality of what they’re reading. They’re more interested in getting through their day than making any serious inquiry into the quality of what Factiva provides them.
This means I have a bigger hill to climb with RSS adoption in my company than I’d previously considered. I’ll continue to mull this over…
