As media watchers work themselves into a lather over hot phenomena like podcasting and RSS feeds, it’s useful to remember that the majority of Internet users have not yet embraced the new gizmos, much less the lingo. In fact, they are not quite sure what the fuss is all about. Thirteen percent of online Americans say they have a good idea of what podcasting is, while 64 percent are “not really sure” and 23 percent have “never heard the term.” RSS technology is even more of a mystery, with only 9 percent having a good idea of what it is. This according to some new Pew Internet & American Life Project data.
So are those who see bright futures in these technologies mistaken? Sometimes the world of blogs and RSS seems to be an isolated, incestuous place, with most blogs and feeds today all about the subject of ... blogs and feeds.
In the long run, the goal for the information industry should be that these things are integrated so well into our lives that we don't even have separate terms for them anymore. It’s like the way people say "I left him a message" today; in the early days of answering machines they might have said “I left a message on his answering machine.” A subtle difference, but most information technologies only really arrive when their names recede into the background. Nobody goes to bed at night thinking, "tomorrow I am going to master RSS!" But they will flock to it when they start discovering a new way to plug content flows into documents, applications, and Web sites, and podcasts will be just another kind of content they deal with all day long without thinking about the technology behind it. The only difference is that ordinary people won’t call these things by their funny techie names. Think of all the happy Internet users who have no idea what hypertext, http, and HTML mean; users shouldn’t need to know the name of a technology in order to use and benefit from it.
