Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I don’t usually read warbloggers, or political blogs more generally. For one thing, they’re more likely to use Blogger, while the geek blogs all have RSS feeds. Blog technology, or lack of it, affects my blog reading more than I ever thought it would when I innocently downloaded NetNewsWire Lite. I’m far, far more likely to read content that’s fully syndicated, like mine, Perversion Tracker’s, and Phil Ringnalda’s, because it shows up right there in NetNewsWire. Next come the blogs that syndicate a summary like Mac OS X Hints - most of the Mac news sites and MovableType blogs do at least that much. The third tier of blogs are those that only syndicate titles, a category which would hardly exist without the half-baked efforts of LiveJournal at providing RSS feeds.

RSS works at the entry level rather than the page level. I don’t right-arrow on nearly as many LJ entries as I used to read before RSS changed my life. I hardly read geek blogs before NetNewsWire, and now I follow a bunch of them. It’s a victory of content over socializing; content won because it costs me fewer click-taxes. Blog content tends to be freestanding and longer, while LJ entries are shorter and more enmeshed in the whole LJ tangle of threads, rumors, memes and wanks. So I get more content per click from blogs.

If Blogger supported RSS, I’d be keeping up better with Lori, who is TNG, and Mike, who’s into politics. Blogger is the only major blogging tool left without free support for some sort of aggregation. I don’t think it’s a wise policy to charge for RSS feeds since it’s not the user who is inconvenienced by their absence - it’s the reader. There’s no direct incentive for Mike to pay money because I want a feed, yet Blogger looks bad for not supporting technology everyone else gives away for free.

Bad Blogger! Get your new sugar daddy to spring for free feeds.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2003 at 12:30 am and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.