I read an interesting book last week called The Tipping Point. It's all about the little factors that cause trends to explode. It got me thinking about the growth of RSS and other data bite formats. By now, we're definitely past the Innovator stage, where RSS is only used by people on the bleeding edge. We're probably just past the early adopter stage, where people who watch the innovators pick up new ideas and make them grow, and riding the leading edge of the early majority stage, where the big boys who don't jump in too quickly, but are always looking for ways to improve finally pile on board. Yahoo! and Google (via their Blogger acquisition) are two examples of the big boys. After that, we'll get to the late majority, the skeptics who won't make a move till something has been validated by the big boys, and then finally to the laggards.

The big names are beginning to pile up behind data bite publishing, but still, when we talk to our family and friends about it, their eyes tend to gloss over, and they don't seem interested in coming on board. Ultimately, the end user is going to have to be sold on the technology for it to go over the top. How do we accomplish this?

One issue that came up in the book was the need to have the message presented differently to different kinds of people. The innovators can call it RSS, but the late majority and even the early majority might need a friendlier name. The early adopters can muddle through poorly designed interfaces, but data biting won't reach its tipping point till they tools are easy for everyone to use. Many in the majority may not even make their move till the tools come pre-installed on their computers or integrated into systems they already use. Yahoo!'s integration of RSS and Atom into My Yahoo! may be exactly what they need.

Perhaps its time to consider who data bite publishing needs to be marketed to, and how to tune the message to the needs of each group. Then, perhaps we could do some real marketing. Not just developing and using the tools, and discussing it all amongst ourselves, but real marketing aimed at spreading the word far and wide.

I'll think about it some more and post my ideas.