TELEVUTION

Like a lot of people, I hadn’t made the switch to Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 until very recently.

I was forwarded a message from our Web contact form that complained that our corporate site was unreadable, but going to it, was unable to reproduce the stated error. I emailed the user back and asked what browser she was on, and she said IE7. I wasn’t worried. According to some statistics I had looked at just a couple of months ago, IE7 had less than a 10% penetration. But then, I went back to those stats, and realized that we’re being Microsofted yet again — IE7 was now at 31%.

I downloaded the new version and installed it, and started fiddling with its features. That’s when I realized that I was staring at the conduit to what is going to become the next widely accepted paradigm of user behavior on the Internet.

Look, RSS feeds have been around for a while. Chances are, you’re reading this article through your RSS/Feed reader, and haven’t really visited the physical site more than once. But when Microsoft makes RSS a fundamental paradigm in its new browser, that’s when you know that everything is about to change.

In the 90’s, the paradigm was “browsing”.  Users stumbled upon content, bookmarked it, and linked to it so that other browsers could find it. In the early 2000’s, when search technology started to get better, we started trying to find things — “Google” became a verb. Now, with millions of blogs and the proliferation of RSS feeds, we’ve started to subscribe to information and content. IE7’s built in support for RSS feeds will bring this latest paradigm into the mainstream.

This means that the advertising model that we’ve worked so hard to update will change yet again. As more and more content gets fed into browsers in a format and schedule that subscribers want, I suspect that we’re going to find CPM rates dropping, and advertising becoming a part of the syndication process. Content sites will start offering micro-syndication of their content to other sites, generating revenue from other sites’ traffic. And we could end up with RSS as yet another verb.