1. RSS is an unspammable medium.
2. As of yet, you can’t spread a virus (or worm) through an RSS channel.
3. The user is FINALLY in full control of his or her subscription (entirely).
4. Instant organization.
5. RSS was crafted with repurposing in mind.
6. High-Impact, Cost-effective, Immediate, Measurable, and Targeted.
7. Entries can be changed, removed, or expired.
8. Users will continue to think twice about sharing their e-mail address with anybody, even after any sort of “legislation” is passed.
9. News aggregators will continue to evolve, but are “good enough” to start using today.
10. The idea of RSS, much like e-mail, is not going to disappear.
[Lockergnome]
This is a list of ten reasons (according to Chris Pirillo) why RSS ought to be the channel of choice going forward for e-mail publishing (newsletters, for example). Each of these reasons (abbreviated above) is expanded and discussed. And Chris makes some excellent points, most of which I agree with. However, take a look at the comments posted to this item. Maybe RSS isn't quite ready for prime time, although if your audience is composed of early adopters and techno-geeks RSS might be ok for you. Here are the objections so far:
1. The email address itself ... is unique, it is handy, it is hard to loose and you don’t need to re-install it everytime you change your Windows or Mac or Linux sheets.
2. I have to have another program to read RSS content.
3. The email newsletter comes to me. Once I am registered I do not have to be proactive. I get newsletters and I read them when they are sent to me or I put aside to read later. Some newsletters aren’t once a day or once a week, they are sporadic. I don’t want to have to go and see if a new edition is out there I just want it to come to me.
4. I just don’t think all the answers are there for the basic computer user.
5. RSS may not be spammable, but it still has the potential to be abused by the publisher.
6. I’d really rather not run a web browser, email client AND a News Reader along with all of the other clients which leap into my Memory from the OSX dock. Having Yet Another Client (YAC) to make effective use of the internet is NOT the strategy.
7. Integrating the newsreader into web browsers and email clients is the answer (Hello, Mozilla?). Until that happens, RSS is for me and my friends at Lockergnome, and will have no demonstrable impact on the unwashed masses.
8. The fact that I, a long-time, moderately knowledgeable Internet marketer, cannot understand even what RSS is and how it could possibly replace email, shows that right now this “solution” could not possibly appeal to non-geeks. I have 6,000+ subscribers to my email newsletter and I doubt if even 2% of them have heard of RSS and understand it.
9. People won’t upgrade from Netscape 4.7 and we expect them to find a news aggregator, install it, use it get the feeds we want them to. It is a long way away.
10. We need to make subscribing to an RSS feed as understandable to their users (and publishers) as easy as it is to subscribe to an email newsletter today.
11:18:57 PM 
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