Peppers & Rogers ends inbox clutter with RSS. C'mon!

Don Peppers wrote an article a few weeks ago entitled, Does RSS Spell Doom for Email Newsletters?, in which he touched on the pro's and cons of RSS and concluded, "The simple truth is that RSS technology has the potential to bypass inbox clutter, and companies want to be ready if it does."

At the bottom of the there was a link to Peppers & Rogers new RSS feed, so I clicked over to see the details.

With regard to the feed itself, the website indicated:

How Do I Use RSS?

Once you have downloaded an RSS feed browser, you simply enter the RSS feed's URL for the particular feed you are interested in, and wait for the content to update. Every time new content is published, a link to the new content will be accessible in your RSS feed browser. If you would like to read the content on the feed, you simply click on the headline in the top pane, and the page will load in the bottom frame ? much like reading your mail in the preview pane in Outlook.

In the Peppers & Rogers Group RSS feed, we post articles published in INSIDE 1to1 and 1to1 Magazine, as well as information about upcoming events and webinars.

A lot like the newsletter, I thought, only I can clean my email inbox and rely on periodic feeds of new content (yes, those underlines are on purpose.).

Imagine my surprise to have seemingly traded a cluttered inbox for a cluttered RSS Feed box. Peppers & Rogers has lived up to their promise of sending me all of the new articles, but they've repeated many--some several times. In fact, my feed last night from P&R 46 headlines (far more than the 6-8 in an e-newsletter), many were a repeat of the feed at the beginning of yesterday, while some were duplicates from days (or even weeks) past. Is this really "uncluttered"? It's the only feed I get where this happens, so I'm sure it's not my reader.

Now, I like the folks at P&R. But really. Couldn't they do a better job at this?

In fact, here's a couple of suggestions:

• Just send me what you haven't sent me before. No repeats, please. If I didn't read it the first time, I probably won't the second or third, and you'll just annoy me.
• Let me choose feed topics. Should be easy to to do. Let me pick the topics of the feeds I'm interested in reading. I'll load those into my reader.

I'll chalk this up to being new with the technology, but I hope they figure it out soon. This has to get better, otherwise I think I'll switch back to the newsletter--less clutter.

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