Blog Business Summit makes a relevant point about RSS:

"For consuming news, a page like Google news is more effective than RSS because there are pretty pictures to look at and those pictures are associated with a headline. I'm sure the RSS pundits will argue that I don't get it and Scoble is reading like 2 million feeds a day now, but I ask where's your stats? Sure, you can note how more people subscribe to RSS, but how many people are reading it? Not many."

1] Images do increase readership, as every media site already knows. RSS headlines aren't there yet, but will be.

2] Google news is effective because it aggregates the most important news on key topics and makes it easily searchable, providing excellent search results. But that has nothing to do with the delivery channel (which, in Google news case, is the web), but with content "creation". I'd love to receive my Google news via RSS.

3] Yes, there is too much content available and people simply subscribe to everything they find, but then never read anything because they don't have the time.

3.a] It's the same with e-mail e-zines: you subscribe, but how often do you read?

3.b] RSS is exceptionally easy to subscribe to and unsubscribe from, which doesn't make anyone think twice before subscribing and makes everyone too lazy to unsubscribe ("I'll do it later, it's easy").

3.c] As predicted in the post yesterday, most RSS usage will probably move towards aggregate search subscriptions with strong content filtering, to only deliver the most relevant content for the end-user. The "overload" problem is the problem of content providers, not the content delivery channel.

3.d] The only way for content publishers to achieve regular and strong readership is to provide unique and highly relevant content on a regular basis (but not too frequent, as once there's too much, we just stop reading it altogether). The best read RSS feeds are those that are tightly focused.

3.e] One of the key RSS developments and uses is delivering vital information, such as new job listings, as explained yesterday as well. Feeds like this, which not only provide something of value, but really improve life, are always going to be read and acted on.

But there is point the author got somewhat wrong:

"Furthermore, if no one visits you're site, they can't comment, buy from you, click your ads, discover your shared love of pugs, or all those other wonderful things we do on the web now."

What's wrong with this picture? Full-text RSS feeds with rich-content. Need I say more?