RSS Fatigue: Should Bloggers Change?
Is it really time to bury RSS? ZDNet Blogger Phil Wainwright and many others [1] [2] have this take on the faults of RSS reading and why RSS isn’t the way to go for feed reading.
When I wrote of the Death of the RSS reader last week, I little realized just how many people have given up on following RSS feeds. Now the slashdot hordes have had their say, it’s all too plain that RSS as currently delivered is fatally flawed. Even the attention bunny’s stamina wavers at times.
I can relate. I follow over 20 news and technology related blogs and sites and around 15 personal blogs using RSS on my Mozilla Thunderbird. This is over and above the 20+ mailing lists I follow regularly using regular email. This does not seem like a slowly flowing river of information to me. It looks like a torrent. Should bloggers change? I don’t really think so. My solution to this is that I monitor edited blogs like Techcrunch, Mobilecrunch, Slashdot, Mohappy and many more instead of reading from the publishers directly. This way I get the benefit of some aggregation and editorial control. My 20+ news and technology blogs would have been much more if it weren’t for these blog sites. Bloggers need not change. Readers should change. They should find like minded bloggers and subscribe to their feeds instead.
I believe that if you have something to write then write it. However, this article got me thinking about Web 2.0 publication. It does have some compelling merits. Maybe I should limit the number of posts I make per day. I don’t want to be contributing to somebody’s Inbox/Email/RSS Fatigue. So, maybe I should limit my posts to at most one (1) per day. This way people just have to hear from me at least once per day (For those who even want to hear from he at all). It also helps me as the probability of that one (1) post getting read is higher. Let me try that out. Maybe my hits per post will increase. Although, the over readership should not change. Call this my experiment as a newbie blogger.
June 13th, 2006 at 7:34 am
i once deleted a feed from a developer who publishes at least 5 entries a day since i couldn’t cope up with her posts. now that i have the time to read blogs at night, i just subscribed again, seeing that the blog really have the content i want.
i don’t agree with your 1 post a day = higher readership, for me, it’s all about the content.
June 13th, 2006 at 9:52 am
content is king! however, i feel that some of the stuff i feel is relevant just don’t get the page views they need because they came in second in the RSS feed.