Blog design in the age of RSS

Back from the holiday and preparing to post more regularly, I've been thinking about the design and content challenges created by our changing way of reading online. If you're like me, virtually all of your time is now spent between two inboxes: your email and your RSS feed (which I read with the excellent web-based Bloglines). Indeed, I've pretty much stopped using bookmarks altogether. If I do visit a site, it's usually via a link in my feed and only then if I feel pretty sure the full text there will be worth the trip.

     With the exception of specific tasks, such as search and transactions, the Web for me has mostly turned into another text-and-minimal-graphics stream that automatically delivers content of interest, differing from my email only in that it's not personal and doesn't require my response. In other words, the age of curiosity or routine-driven surfing may be ending. The future, once again, looks like Push.

     That represents two big shifts. First, it's a significant aesthetic retreat, from the pretty to the practical (following the Google model), and from the entire package to the single post. Second, it's a behavioral change on the part of the readers:  in a subscription age, where publishers don't have to entice you back each day with a flood of new content, quality trumps quantity. Once they've won you as a RSS subscriber, it requires an active decision on your part to unsubscribe. This puts a premium on the thoughtful post, no matter how infrequent, and discourages floods of random miniposts designed to drive return traffic.

     The risk is no longer of losing readers with an an insufficient volume of posts, but of annoying readers with insufficiently interesting posts. In my original article, I argued that Long Tail tactics discourage overthinking the quality question. Throw it all out there and let the marketplace sort it out, I urged; good will rise to prominence and bad will fade to obscurity.  But the problem with RSS is that it isn't a marketplace. Once someone's subscribed to your feed, they get everything, whether they want it or not. Bad content is as prominent as good content, and one can tarnish the other. So what are the new Rules of Push? Is there a Push threshold--a post worth pushing? If not, what to do with it?

     The reason I raise this is that I've got to figure out what to do with my "Long Tail comment elsewhere" sidebar, which will probably get updated more often than the main posts. It isn't part of my feed, so it's only readable by people who come to the site. If my experience is like that of other bloggers I've spoken to about this, that will soon be a minority of my readership. So the value of any blog content that isn't in the feed, from sidebars to the overall design of the site, is diminishing.

     Right now there's no good way to add a TypeList (which is what that sidebar is) to my feed, but the folks at Moveable Type say that feature is coming in Q1. So there's a decision to make then: add the sidebar to my feed and risk annoying people with lots of unhelpfully telegraphic posts, or don't add it to the feed and risk it going unread. (Another option may be to have a separate feed just for the sidebar, which gives people a choice, but that feels a bit clumsy and overly complicated). Which is best?

Comments

[456465]

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[456465]

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[logo design]

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[Logo Design]

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[ram]

Content is King. The Long Tail predicts that browsers will more probably find your earlier posts than regular subscribers to your feed. In fact, viewers would probably then search within your blog to check what you have done with these same search terms earlier, in order to find your chain of thought (ala Feedster Search or Google) and see if the content was useful to them.

Practically, the best way to attract volumes of readers is to routinely submit high quality posts in your niche of interest/specialty, or be very prolifically esoteric in your postings, being unique in viewpoint in all areas you are interested.

The answer, in both cases, is to listen you your muse and give it always the best you have to give...