Actually, rss is reasonably mainstream. You don't have to explain rss to normal people!
Most of my non-hacker friends use some sort of feed reader. They know that RSS lets them read blog posts in their feedreader without visiting the blog, even though they may not know the format specifications.
I don't know a person who uses RSS and I am in college and all my friends are engineers. I think hackers often mistake their friends as representative of the national demographic. I bet more people type URLs into Google search than use RSS. Seriously, have you ever noticed how many internet users type www.cnn.com into a Google search box? That is probably the median level of internet proficiency in this country.
This is how I have explained RSS for the past 4-5 years:
Question: Simplifying greatly, what are the 2 ways you can get a newspaper/periodical/magazine?
Answer: One way is for you to go buy the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Pull). The other is for the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Push) to be delivered to you whenever it is published.
RSS is similar to getting the newspaper delivered to you, and hence saving you from hitting refresh or checking a website to see if it has been updated.
Similar to email, RSS needs a reader/client to read these updates, and these readers/clients could be similar to microsoft outlook or yahoo/gmail/hotmail.
RSS needs to be integrated into email clients, not web browsers. RSS's "notification" use cases are closer to email, even in the terminology ("subscribe"). If there was better support in email clients, RSS would see more use for things like ecommerce shipment notifications, website and ecommerce "newsletters" (which often get marked as spam when sent as email) and the like. The user remains in "control" then, unlike email spam, because they can unsubscribe by grabbing the feed anymore. Reach statistics would be more accurate too (for the same content that was traditionally delivered via email).
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 34.4 ms ] threadMost of my non-hacker friends use some sort of feed reader. They know that RSS lets them read blog posts in their feedreader without visiting the blog, even though they may not know the format specifications.
Question: Simplifying greatly, what are the 2 ways you can get a newspaper/periodical/magazine?
Answer: One way is for you to go buy the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Pull). The other is for the newspaper/periodical/magazine (Push) to be delivered to you whenever it is published.
RSS is similar to getting the newspaper delivered to you, and hence saving you from hitting refresh or checking a website to see if it has been updated.
Similar to email, RSS needs a reader/client to read these updates, and these readers/clients could be similar to microsoft outlook or yahoo/gmail/hotmail.
Useless in the same way plumbing is to a house. I like to think of RSS & Atom as the plumbing of the Internet.