An interesting article about some sites who are switching to RSS feeds instead of news letters.

“E-mail is dead, period,” declares Chris Pirillo, the Internet entrepreneur who distributes about 400,000 e-mail newsletters weekly. “I don’t care what kind of legislation goes through, people aren’t signing up for newsletters anymore. People are assuming that every e-mail publisher is a spammer.” Internet News

That’s quite excellent. Personally, I see RSS feeds as less intrusive than an email. Emails just appear in my inbox (I usually have no rules for newsletters), whereas an RSS feed shows when it’s updated so I can read it at my leisure.

About.com’s e-mail guide, Heinz Tschabitscher, agrees. In a note titled RSS Feeds are the Better Email Newsletters, Tschabitscher touts RSS as the bona-fide answer to spam. “The best thing about RSS is that if you subscribe to an RSS feed, you only get what you want. If you tell the feed reader to stop collecting a site’s feed, it will stop. And there’s no spam,” he declared. Internet News

There are, however, a few factual errors in the article:

Mickiewicz says RSS was never intended to syndicate anything besides headlines with descriptions and warned that an RSS feed can lead to bandwidth wastage. “If you’re on a shared account or your bandwidth is restricted, it can mean a big hit to your hosting bill. Imagine, 100,000 subscribers checking your RSS feed 4-6 times a day for updates!,” Mickiewicz wrote in SitePoint Editor’s Note. Internet News

The solution, which is already implemented in most of the RSS aggregators, is called Last-Modified headers HTTP Conditional GET. Here’s how it works: Your aggregator goes to the server and says “Hi, I last downloaded this RSS feed four hours ago. Has it changed?” to which the server replies either “Nope,” in which case the aggregator doesn’t bother to download it again, or “Yup,” making the aggregator download it. I believe that Apache sends these headers by default.