Crt Jakhel, the father of Finance-on.net, is one of the people I interviewed for my upcoming report on RSS.

Here are some interesting excerpts from the interview. As you'll see, Crt shares quite a different view on RSS than the vocal majority.

Rok: It seems that RSS means many different things to many different people. What is it to you?

Crt: It is a content delivery vehicle, and not a particularly good one at that, which has been blown out of proportion. This has happened because of the increasing need to do something about the noise level and delivery difficulties of email. (Remember that RSS was a "sleeper" technology for years; it's only been ressurected recently and is in no way something new.) It is, however, questionable whether the end users feel the same pressing need to move away from email as do the people who actually send email as their main way of doing business. I would say that there is some danger of RSS "overheating", of collapsing under the weight of misplaced / misdirected expectations. But then I'm a person who likes to stick to the stock market saying "take care of your downside and the upside will take care of itself". I tend to look for defficiencies, shoot things down and go with the survivors.

Rok: In addition, RSS is dubbed as the "perfect spam-free medium". Would you agree?

Crt: That would depend. If you define spam as somebody inserting unwanted messages, I would say that RSS or other straight-from-the-source methods is quite safe on that front. However, at least from the user's point of view, that's far from being everything that can bother you. If RSS grabs market share, everybody will concentrate on it, including people
hard-pressed to make a sale. In this future I see ad-covered readers and channels where topical information is interspersed heavily by ads. Ads in general can be damn close to spam on the noise and nastiness scale as far as the user is concerned. Of course in a perfect world that would not be so; and yet it is. Nothing is perfect. Perfection is for suckers.

Rok: Where do you see the future of RSS?

Crt: For one thing, I believe I've spent much more time thinking about RSS in this interview that I will spend in the next few months of actually putting content online and delivering it to my users. :)

In general terms I see RSS as a niche mechanism in controlled environments and a supporting player in distribution of high-attraction content. I'll be somewhat surprised if it comes to more than that. As in the stock market, in the online world it's in your interest to always be prepared, but always stay flexible. If I'm ever suprised by RSS's success, hey, that's great, I'll go along as it comes. But right now: no demand and a real danger of overhyping.