Jakob Nielsen nails it in his most recent AlertBox column: Use Old Words When Writing for Findability.

While it may be tempting for some of us to opine about Web 2.0 – i.e. the next generation Web, defined in part by user-created content such as YouTube videos, MySpace and Facebook – don’t!

If your goal is to be found online by adults (call them customers and prospects if you want to sound really old-school) who don’t live and breathe the latest techie terms, then for heaven’s sake don’t fill your blog entries with terms like RSS and tagging. Most folks don’t have a clue.

Emarketer_rss_piechart

 

Check out this illustration from eMarketer for an article titled Really Seldom Syndication. eMarketer notes that “merely 2% of US employees subscribe to RSS feeds and only 9% know what such feeds are.”