It remains a mystery why the majority of the Nigerian mainstream news media with significant real estates on the Internet have not taken steps to overhaul their various domains to reflect one of the most basic Internet trends of the new world - making their subscriptions available via RSS feeds (RSS: Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary).
Yet, most Nigerians are news junkies, particularly those of us in the Diaspora; the consumption of news about the homeland has become a daily addiction. Even more Nigerians are now embracing the newer Web 2.0 concepts of blogging, reading digital information via [tag]RSS[/tag] feeds, and creating personalized homepages (via Pageflakes, Netvibes, e.t.c.).
What is RSS?
According to Wikipedia:
“RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content…Users of RSS content use programs called feed “readers” or “aggregators”: the user subscribes to a feed by supplying to his or her reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.”
The use of RSS feed subscription has become a standard on the web which the the major Nigerian mainstream news media have totally ignored.
What is Guardian (http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/), ThisDay (http://www.thisdayonline.com/), Vanguard (http://vanguardngr.com/), Punch (http://www.punchng.com/Default.aspx), The sun News (http://sunnewsonline.com/) and BusinessDay (http://www.businessdayonline.com/) waiting for? Even the most prominent Nigerian news aggregating site - NigeriaWorld (http://nigeriaworld.com/) - has no RSS feeds!
These domains have more than decent traffic and patronage from readers in and outside Nigeria. They are among the top 100,000 most-visited sites worldwide according to Alexa’s metrics - a commendable feat by world web standard. The argument becomes even more potent since the cumulative users of these sites are not within Nigeria or Africa - a demographic group which I believe is predominately made up of the Nigerian Diaspora - a sizable community that is more familiar subscribing to RSS feeds, and one that will benefit the most from its use.
Why is RSS subscription relevant?
I see RSS feeds as baits.
Why would any media house “lock-up” valuable information on its domains, while it can be headlined, summarized or excerpted, and served in the World Wide Web as “baits” on RSS feed readers? All it takes is a “click” (and the bait is swallowed!) and the reader reeled into the relevant pages on the news site faster than just browsing through the enormous piles and pages of information.
It simply saves time! It expands the readership base. It offers subscribers (readers) and news vendors some productive ways of interacting with each other that do not exist at present. It is a really SIMPLE way of sharing information as the diagram above shows! (Image from www.state.wv.us)
We now live in a world that has shrunk into a global village where easily accessible information is key. Nigeria is at the very fringes of this village; we are not there yet. I’m strongly persuaded that the news media outlets can significantly facilitate our transition into this village. And the sooner the better - for them and for all Nigerians.
You haven’t been the only one wondering. I think the owners of these websites don’t see their visitors as users. ‘I have a website’, the address at the bottom of most newspapers seems to say but in reality, visitors still have to deal with badly-designed, popup-studded and extremely slow loading sites.
It’s not surprising that with these other basic features ignored, there isn’t any form of syndication offered. Sad — real sad.
April 7, 2007 at 3:34 pm
[...] Nigerian mainstream media has not embraced RSS to deliver content online: It remains a mystery why the majority of the Nigerian mainstream news media with significant real estates on the Internet have not taken steps to overhaul their various domains to reflect one of the most basic Internet trends of the new world - making their subscriptions available via RSS feeds (RSS: Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary). Ndesanjo Macha [...]
April 7, 2007 at 5:15 pm
When there’s no real belief in technology & its advancement, such things are bound to happen.
April 8, 2007 at 1:21 am
Obviously they are blind to the potential revenue streams which they could attain with this. They deliver their streams to allafrica.com in some format surely they can deliver it to the public to. The funny thing is RSS feeds would take 10 minutes to roll out if they had someone competent doing it.
Anyways along the lines of RSS and News. The new project at Afriville is to roll out rss feeds on a per country and a per tag basis. Hence when you type the likes of news.afrville.com/feed/tag
You get rss news on that tag whether its country specific or tag specific. Watch out for developments on the site
April 8, 2007 at 9:37 am
Africa always misses out on every civilization-building event in history! Was is the industrial revolution or the internet revolution: both of which had produced the most dramatic changes in the way the civilized world operates?
Now the blog/rss revolution is taken off (yes! blog/rss is the next great revolution) and we are not joining in!
blog/rss is upturning the way the world shares information. what is happening in the remotest jungle can be captured in picture, audio or video, loaded onto a blog be immidiately copied by rss unto to millions or even billions of computers, mobile phones, internet tablets and whatever device that has an aggregator or reader installed.
You can think of this as millions and billions of CNNs only that this information will not be subject to the monopoly of a few as we currently have it.
Just like all revolutions, those that choose to ignore the trend will only be swept away!. And our media businesses are surely not an exception to this rule.
April 10, 2007 at 2:40 pm
I have wondered about this myself. Eko FM brought in professionals from the UK to work on their website. Look at what they ended up with. CRAP.
April 12, 2007 at 12:27 pm
…and the annoying thing is that they overlooked Woo Interactive and some other solid Nigerian web developers…
April 14, 2007 at 1:50 am
[...] In the absence of RSS feeds from the local media in Nigeria and a lack of in-depth coverage from the mainstream media, people like Bill of Jewel in the Jungle had to visit Nigerian blogs to know what was happening: I cannot think of any one group of people from an African nation that have been more influential and active in the growth of the blogosphere over the past 3-4 years than the Nigerian blog authors and their readers worldwide. When I want to learn the latest news about what’s happening down in Nigeria I automatically check with high-profile bloggers Imnakoya of Grandiose Parlor, Chippla Vandu of Chippla’s Blog, and Sokari Erkine of Black Looks. There are many, many more good online authors who hail from Nigeria and/or write extensively about Nigeria but these three people are my first GoTo bloggers for information about the country. [...]
April 25, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Sturvs.com is very much RSS enabled.
June 7, 2007 at 10:15 am