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Is RSS Hurting The Blogging Community?

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 Let me start off by saying that I Use RSS Feeds, I think they are a great advantage in expediting research. If your favorite Blogs haven’t posted anything, you don’t waste a lot of time looking for things that aren’t there. You can Scan Feeds to see if there is anything worth opening and reading the whole post. They save oodles of time.

I LIKE RSS…

Everyone I know uses RSS and solicits subscribers (including myself). Darren Rowse even has a series running that explains How To Make Your RSS Feeds Pop!  and Gleb Reys of Perfect Blogger has a post today that gives an RSS Reading Productivity Tip on how to deal with a multitude of Feeds. There are even Bloggers that use Links to Feeds rather than the Blog/post itself. Everywhere you look you can find someone singing the praises of using RSS (usually by reading a feed).

But, RSS Feeds are Bare Bones. You get the Content of the Post. In some cases, you get the full content with any enhancements like graphs or pictures, but not much else. Some give you nothing but a teaser (probably trying to entice you to click through).

What are we missing by using RSS instead of visiting Blogs?

• The Ambiance… People work really hard to give their Blogs a unique look. They spend a lot of time working on the First Impression, mixing and matching colors, blending ads, putting things in the right places and generally trying to match the Blog to the Theme they are presenting. You lose the”feel” of the Blog in a Feed.
• The Conversation… I don’t know about the rest of you, but when I view a Feed, no matter how good the content, I am less likely to make a comment even if I COULD tell a conversation was happening. I usually just read and go on to the next feed. Sometimes I intend to go back to comment, but it is unlikely that I will remember to do it. If I am actually on the page and see a conversation going on, I will more often than not, join in. With a feed, it just seems so impersonal.
• The Whole Picture… Any Featured Pages, Contact Information, About Page, Blog Roll, Series, Popular Posts, Categories, Latest Post, Recent Comments, Archives, Newsletter Subscriptions, not to mention Advertisements are Non-existent in Feeds. (Yes, I know you can get Ads through FeedBurner and Text Link Ads, but most of us won’t ever reach their Subscriber Minimum for Acceptance.) Basically, you are missing the Head, Footer and Sidebar, as well as Other Posts on the page.
• The Community… Although I can and do understand the use of RSS, I think it can also be an impediment if the intent of your Blogging is to build a Community, at least in the early stages. Most RSS Subscribers seem to be pretty fickle. They will subscribe one day if they like a post, and the following day will unsubscribe if they don’t find exactly what they expect of you. There is no interaction between the reader and the Blog.

As I said in the beginning, I use and like RSS and find it very useful, but I think we may be losing the Community that Blogging has brought about.

What do you think? Are we losing the sense of Community? Does RSS impede the Conversation?

Technorati Tags: RSS, Blogging, Community

February 15th, 2007 at 06:20am | Posted by Joe | Blogging, Community, RSS | 17 reader remarks | Print This Post