RSS relieves pressure to publish

(This is very probably not an original observation. In fact, I think I've read this myself somewhere, but I can't remember where. But it's important and not said enough, so I'll repeat it.)

Conventional web-publishing wisdom says that the way to grow and maintain your audience is to publish often. This is in part because people actually have to remember to visit your site. If each time a visitor comes to you site she sees new content, she's more likely to have a good experience with the site, and thus remember to visit the site again. If you don't publish for a few weeks, the site isn't maintaining it's value to people, and your traffic tapers off as visitors visit less frequently (if they remember to visit at all).

Publishers thus experience a pressure to create new content all the time. Every moment you're not posting to your blog you're risking losing visitors. This pressure, I believe, is one of the driving factors behind blogger burnout. It also causes people to post crap. It's better to post drivel than to post nothing at all.

An unsung benefit of RSS changes that. If all your readers are subscribed to your RSS feed, they don't have to remember to check your site. This means that you can go for months without posting anything. Checking for updates no longer requires mental capital. Particle Tree puts it nicely:

For those of us that have adopted RSS feeds, gone are the days of wasting time making the rounds through over 100 bookmarks just to see who might have said something new.

This means you can post only when you want to, only when you feel you have something really important to say, and your audience will still be there. Isn't that super-fantastic!

BIG CAVEAT: Not that many people actually use RSS feeds, so the conventional wisdom of posting often to maintain traffic still applies. But as RSS technology matures (i.e., as feed readers become easier to use), more people will use it, and the more pressure it will relieve on publishers to write frequently.

In the long run, I think blogs that publish infrequently and don't currently get much traffic will be the publishers who really benefit from RSS. This contrasts with major news media like the BBC, CNN, or the NY Times who were pioneers in offering RSS feeds. Everybody knows they publish articles every few minutes, so there's not much of an advantage to having an RSS reader alert you to new CNN stories.