Is it the user or RSS that really matters?

I continue to enjoy Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 who I think is one of the more insightful writers today. In his latest post, Scott chides writers, bloggers, and publishers to focus on the user, not the technology. This was written in response to a lot of words written over the weekend by Dave Winer about how RSS technology should become more popular. Scott's reaction is refreshing.

There are two prevailing views of the evolution of online information flow — one focuses on the arc of technology, the other on what the user wants and needs. The technology-centric view focuses on issues like RSS adoption rates and RSS vs. email. The user-centric view focuses on issues like how people can find the information they want in a sea of information.

I think technology-centric view is focusing on the trees rather than the forest. Most people don’t care what technology enables them to get the information they want — they just want the information they want.

We need more people in the business world who have this viewpoint, instead of the mindset that great technology would take off if we could just show users all these wonderful features. Scott has some great responses, which I'm going to weave together here at the end, albeit in a different order than they were in the original article:

It doesn’t matter to most people whether they are in the “RSS world” or not. What matters to them is whether they can find what’s “relevant.”
....
If we achieve 100% adoption of RSS, that in itself will do nothing to solve the information overload problem. (If you think information overload is only a problem at the “edge,” you’re taking the technology-centric view.)

Scott clearly understands that the tyranny of too much is the much bigger challenge to all of us than what software we use. And given that RSS adopters are complaining nowadays about all the data they need to look through in their feeds, we need to look beyond web services alphabet soup to overcome the tyranny of too much information.

Technorati Tags: Analysis, Marketing, Publishing, RSS, Tyranny Of Too Much, Web, Web 2.0