Leader: Email versus RSS

The death of email has been greatly exaggerated. Or has it?

A survey out today shows the extent to which businesspeople in different countries use it. As we've long known, factors such as overall internet penetration and the culture of preferring to meet face-to-face have an impact on the time spent using the world's favourite messaging medium.

But is email, as the report's authors suggest, in no danger of being supplanted? As the use of instant messaging (IM) has risen it is clear there is some substitution but quite often IM becomes an additional channel, just as email didn't do away with telephone calls or the telephone disappear with written letters.

In terms of business use, though, there is a growing school of thought that end users want to pull information to their desktops - equally phones or TV screens, for that matter - as opposed to being fed an unsolicited diet of miscellanea.

Step forward RSS. Standing for really simple syndication, RSS has in recent times started to mean less proactive website visiting or waiting around on the off chance that a site owner will send through an alert at the right time.

RSS readers promise to bring the web to an inbox, of sorts. And that's just the sort of talk gets advertisers worried in the age of personal video recorders for the TiVo generation.

But wait. Today we also hear that a company has worked out a way to pair advertising with RSS feeds. It seems there's gold in them there hills and the usual clutch of new media execs plan to mine it.

Where does this leave us? As one writer says, RSS may increasingly become a pain in the side of email, at least for direct marketing. We're not sure how far that trend will go.

But as new forms of communication and content distribution evolve, so too will there be someone there trying to grab eyeballs. TV and print may be losing their efficacy but new options seem to keep on springing up.