RSS Reduces Pressure to Post Daily
I've come across a couple of articles now about the need to post on your blog frequently, daily at least, to maintain your readership. This may have been true in the recent past (what is referred to as "Web 1.0"), when readers would visit your blog daily to check for new material and would be disappointed to find nothing new.
But now that the web is moving into an age of RSS feeds and feedreaders (the so-called "Web 2.0"), the pressure to post frequently is becoming less of an issue. People are not trotting down to your website to see what's new; instead, you are pushing content into their feedreaders. If you don't post for a few days, people using feedreaders will not mind as much, as they have a lot of other feeds to catch up on anyway. Most of them will not even notice.
This is good news for writers. The advent of RSS alleviates some of the pressure to post frequently. We have more freedom to wait until good ideas occur to us before writing.
But now that the web is moving into an age of RSS feeds and feedreaders (the so-called "Web 2.0"), the pressure to post frequently is becoming less of an issue. People are not trotting down to your website to see what's new; instead, you are pushing content into their feedreaders. If you don't post for a few days, people using feedreaders will not mind as much, as they have a lot of other feeds to catch up on anyway. Most of them will not even notice.
This is good news for writers. The advent of RSS alleviates some of the pressure to post frequently. We have more freedom to wait until good ideas occur to us before writing.
posted by Jonathan at
3/18/2005 09:53:00 p.m.
3 Comments:
One caveat I would add to your post is that us big-time over-organized RSS readers WILL remove your feed if we notice that few or no new posts have been made in some time. Otherwise, though, you are totally correct.
By
Anonymous, at 3/18/2005 10:20 p.m.
Good point, Todd. I do RSS spring cleaning too, and I wonder why we do it, as the dormant feeds aren't costing anything seemingly ... Probably the main cost is the mental energy (small, but additive) that we expend in holding on to a dormant feed. Sometimes ya just gotta clean house!
By
Jonathan, at 3/18/2005 11:14 p.m.
And finally the truth comes out: Todd you have admitted to be a "big-time over-organized RSS reader"!!!
By
Jonathan, at 3/18/2005 11:16 p.m.
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