As a friend of mine said yesterday: "Email is dying,sure. But it's a slow death. Like 5 or 10 years". I've heard that statistics are showing that more and more people are turning to RSS, but I don't believe that means the majority of Internet users know what RSS is. Hell, a bunch of people I know don't even know what a blog is, never mind a "feed".
But I digress...
One thing that I find funny is that there are more than a few RSS to Email services out there. Wasn't RSS supposed to take the place of email? It seems that there's enough people that want their content delivered to their inbox that it's worth service provider's time to figure out how to stuff all sorts of content into email.
Podcast Sender is the next little service on the market that will allow you to use your inbox as a podcatcher. Yup, you tell it to watch a podcast feed or feeds for you and when a new episode appears on the feed, it sends you an email. I'm not clear on whether the service just sends and alert or if it actually delivers the audio file in the email. Regardless, podcatching for the podcatcherless has arrived.
I think this is a great idea. Our stats show that less than 1/2 of our listeners use a podcatcher and other studies are backing this stat up. I think that's largely because people can't be bothered to find out what RSS is and then translate that into podcatching. It's so much easier to just go and download it from the producer's site, you know? I'm very interested in how this service takes off. I predict it will do well.
