I have always approached this blog as being less of a blog and more of a column, a place where I write articles on things that interest me each of which I invest a lot of time into creating.
I'm very happy to do that but in a lot of ways, it's very limiting. There are often smaller pieces of news or comment that I'd like to post here but don't for fear of diluting what I perceive to be the essence of the blog or alienating my readership.
Impatient consumer
Ironically, not only does it mean I produce longer posts but I'm also very aware that it makes the posts I do write less accessible. I love how easy it is to consume information via RSS and onscreen but when people write things that take longer than a minute to read, it also frustrates me.There are some blogs like Paul Graham, Joel and even Ryan's Barenakedapp that I'd prefer to take longer over and read on the tube or over breakfast but I don't have my computer with me then and FeedDemon doesn't have an easy way to print.
Not wanting to rush their articles means I often don't read them at all and both Paul and Joel's last 10 posts lie unread in FeedDemon despite the fact that I'd much rather read them than much of the noise I've read elsewhere.
The deafening noise of RSS
My frustration with the single-threading of RSS as a publisher is the flip side of my frustration with my frustrations with RSS-overflow as a consumer.One of the format's main drawbacks is its daunting signal to noise ratio. It's incredibly easy to receive news from 100 sources a day but not so easy to filter out the content you actually want, it's drinking from a firehose.
Some efforts have been made to solve this problem using smart filtering techniques but to my mind, a large part of the problem would simply go away if producers were given the tools to pre-filter and channel their content.
Our newspapers are divided into News, Politics, Sport, Lifestyle, Television etc. I don't have to read every article about the World Cup before I can find out what's on TV tonight, I just flip to the TV page.
Why not then build multi-threading into RSS?
Producer prefiltering
I would much rather produce one Webkitchen feed that contains only 'articles' and another where I post other frothier content like videos, links and news.In today's RSS architecture though, the overhead of bundling both feeds together into one website and communicating the mutual relationship to my audience means it's currently not worth the effort.
Threading content is essentially what Mike Arrington has done with TechCrunch, CrunchGear, TechCrunchUK, CrunchNotes etc but he's got a considerably stronger brand than I have and even then I'll bet many of his subscribers don't know the other sites even exist.
I know that there are workarounds to this - I could tag articles and create an RSS feed around specific tags but that's not a solution, it's a workaround and it's one that will simply be lost on most consumers.
Threading and Deeptag
This ability to thread or channel content is an essential part of the nature of Deeptag. Deeptag uses a hybrid of RSS and OPML to allow content creators to thread their content and present it in such a way that the threads are all immediately available and obvious to the consumer.Doing this allows content creators to pre-filter the tidal wave of material that flows into RSS aggregators in such a way that it's easier for consumers to get only what they're looking for.
Deeptag unfortunately isn't available just yet and until it is, I'm going to have to find a different solution.
For me, that solution is going to be simply to change what I write and to produce shorter posts that are perhaps less considered. I don't want to dilute the quality of what I produce but then what's the point in a high quality article that never gets written?
What are your thoughts, how do you approach your blog and what do you like to read in others?
3 comments:
Dirk Olbertz
The way you describe your way of blogging, is very similar to how I do it: in fear of having too much noise, insider jokes, etc., I only come up with a few entries per month. Although there is a lot more that is at my mind and which I would like to share with people.
I started "channeling" on a broader base: I have different projects I work on and each now has a blog where I can put things up. In addition, I'm about to create a photoblog on my site to extract this kind of blogging entries.
In the end, my main blog gets less and less articles.
I never thought about having different rss feeds, but that's a really interesting idea.
I just cannot decide which way would be better: having all on the site and divide the RSS-Feed, or not showing those "notes" in the site, but put them into the RSS-Feed. Because as you said: you're easily capable of reading/scanning a few hundred articles a day - as long as they are short enough.
Ross Parker
1. If I have a simple pointer that I want to post, I write a draft and leave it. If I think of an angle to turn it into a post (another idea on the same theme, for example) then I will post it. Otherwise, I'll get rid of it.
2. Have a feed for such things on your Del.icio.us feed. This way, with a Firefox plugin, you can write little commentaries on other articles/sites/things you like and post them to Del.icio.us. As I use Wordpress, an extension allows people to see these 'sidenotes' on the sidebar.
Wordpress does have numerous unofficial 'asides' plugins, which do the same thing, in different ways, but which use separate RSS feeds.
Hugo
Pete -
I'm very disappointed that your company is still called "Webkitchen" and not "NIXEYSOFT". I'm eagerly awaiting a cassette tape (although I've also recently purchased one of these new 5 1/4 inch disk drives) containing a beta version of your bat and ball game and the Frogger clone.