RSS may be the next big wave, but so far it seems only to have crashed down on the heads of those of us living in Tech Boom Bay. When we try to tell others about the revolution, we say shish-boom-bah, but they hear blah-blah-blah. Picking a colloquial term to describe RSS and other data bite formats has already be discussed here and elsewhere. What else can we do to improve our efforts at evangelizing these technologies?

The primary reason, I suspect, for people not trying out RSS is that they haven't grasped the benefits. Perhaps they've never gotten started reading news off the net because it was always too time consuming, so they don't have a sense of how useful online news can be. Perhaps they're so jaded by their burgeoning email inboxes that they loathe the thought of adding yet another data source to their computer.

Another reason I've heard for not trying RSS is that people just don't want to go through the trouble of installing another program on their computer. To many of us, that may not seem like a big deal, but it seems to be a real burden to some.

In these two issues, we find a clue to a solution: we need to visit our friends and family and install feed readers for them. Then we need to subscribe them to a few newsfeeds that will be of interest to them. After we've subscribed to a few for them, we should put them behind the wheel and let them do a few more. We should also be sure they know how to unsubscribe. Once they've had a taste of what data bite feeds can do for them, if they're not interested, so be it. But those who do get hooked may become more effective evangelists than we are.