New numbers seem to fly in the face of current wisdom. Blogging still beats Twitter in terms of benefit for employees, as well as customers. A survey of 1,700 executives found 43 percent felt blogs provided significant benefit for internal use. An even greater number – 51 percent – of business leaders said blogs benefitted outreach to customers and clients.
Real Simple Syndication (RSS), the technology used to distribute blog posts and other news, was also seen as beneficial to business.
“That’s 24% more than those who see any benefit from microblogging (i.e. Twitter),” wrote Steven Walling of ReadWriteWeb.
In recent months, a number of voices have pronounced RSS virtually dead with Twitter dancing on the grave.
“It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore,” Steve Gillmore wrote in a May 5 piece entitled ‘Rest in Peace, RSS.’ The recent news that former FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo (now with Google) would join Twitter as COO only seem to confirm that view.
Gillmore and others argue Google Reader helped kill RSS by disconnecting audiences from blogs. Rather than going to blogs and using RSS, you simply entered the website name and the articles appeared in full-text, surrounded by a Google-created atmosphere of ads and targeted links.
[Via ReadWriteWeb, Steve Gillmore and McKinsey]
