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

[rakel]

I've never really used RSS, but it doesn't look like something I'd really get into. I like going to people's sites as a way of personal expression: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Of course, being a webdesigner, I would appreciate that sort of thing.

[Ben Phenix]

More blogs should pay attention to how their RSS feed look. Many otherwise decent feeds are truncated or do not format correctly. There are some otherwise great feeds I have unsubscribed from because of this (see adrants). Long Tail comes through nicely for me.

When I have hundreds of articles/post to read through each day, making it more difficult to use is not a winning strategy (even if it saves some marginal bandwidth -- and there is a much better ways to deal with that issue).

Back to your main point. Too many post will certainly damper the perceived quality. Even some of the great feeds out there get the skim treatment if there is too much. One of the other fundamental problem is that the with people who publish too much, they tend to flog certain themes well past the point of annoyance or their style simply becomes too much to bear (gregg easterbrook comes to mind hear).

I almost never visit a blog site directly anymore except to forward the link to a friend, therefore non-RSS content is lost to me. My reader is NewFire which I like quite a bit for its offline and search features. One small improvement would be a way to fish the trackback or direct url from the reader itself (say right-click).

[praktike]

Just add another blog w/ its own RSS feed.

Here's an example:

http://www.646industries.com/beyond/

You could have a "long posts" blog in the center, and a "short posts" blog in the sidebar. I don't know how easy it would be to do with MT, but it's a snap with WordPress.

[praktike]

Oh, and I believe you could just create an RSS feed for your trackbacks, which would essentially make your current sidebar automatic.

[Cliff]

You should create a second rss feed for the "elsewhere" posts. People could then subscribe to one or both. Many people create a second rss feed for their link blog. For an example see http://jeremy.zawodny.com/linkblog/index.xml and http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/rss2.xml

[Ross Mayfield]

Dude, its Pull, not Push.

But anyway, for low threshold links, here's what I do:
* Use del.icio.us plus a bookmarklet that lets me easily move from browsing to annotating
* Use Feedroll to include your delicious feed in the sidebar of your blog with your custom blog design
* Use Feedburner to track reader stats and splice your links into the feed. The result is this http://feeds.feedburner.com/ross

[Ian Philpot]

Some of the feedback I have received on my blog has help me decide what to do with links. The few readers I do have were split between the content and the links. For this reason I have created a 2nd miniblog for them much like Waxy.org Link Miniblog. Now all posts go to one blog and links go to the other. I decided this would cut down on the confusion. Also based on your conclusion of the two inboxes I made the gamble that the readers that cared for the links would take the time to subscribe. Now the feedback is much more positive and I seem to be right...for a change.

I also agree with you point about quality vs. quantity. I find my self lately unsubscribing to feeds due to the fact that their quality has not improved, but rather decreased. Quantity isn't so much of an issue for me unless nothing is getting moved to my "clippings to read" folder, but then you already said that...

[Ross Mayfield]

Oh, and I forgot,

* you can use the Recent Trackbacks typepad sidebar to display posts that have trackbacked to yours
* but there is value in human editing, so use a Technorati watchlist to monitor when people are writing in reference to you and then use the above to link to it in your blog and feed

[Anthony Baker]

I recommend doing an RSS feed for your posts, and also one for your sidebar links. My RSS subscription tally stands at close to 200 sites that I read regularly via RSS, and I love the ones who have sidebar pointers. These are almost asides, but are often very, very cool stuff.

Off the top of my head, Jason Kottke does this wonderfully, as does Jon Hicks, the icon designer for Firefox, as does Merlin Mann of 43 Folders (hacking Getting Things Done) fame.

From my perspective, it's really not that complicated and isn't clumsy in the least.

Oh, and on the RSS front: I find that most of the avid RSS readers are still at the edge of the curve on this. I know a slew of folks who are much less saavy with web browsing and computing in general who have no idea what it is.

I think that until it's much more integrated into the web browser directly (or email, ala Newsgator) and feeds are made even more discoverable, we'll still not reach mainstream audiences.

[Chris Anderson]

Great advice, Ross. Many thanks!

[Chris Anderson]

Thanks, Anthony. That's what I'll do when MT releases the feature.

[jack]

I'll second Ross's suggestions of del.icio.us and FeedBurner, though I run my own recently-installed linkblog a little differently:

1. collect and annotate bookmarks using del.icio.us. Items destined for my linkblog are tagged "linkblog"
2. run a cron job every 6 hours to fetch a pre-formatted HTML snippet containing my most recent N del.icio.us bookmarks that have the "linkblog" tag (http://del.icio.us/html/USERNAME/TAGNAME). This snippet is included in my page via PHP.
3. offer my regular feed, plus a linkblog-only feed (provided by del.icio.us), plus a spliced feed (provided by FeedBurner). I happen to enjoy the option of collecting all the del.icio.us bookmarks from a given day in a single RSS item; this keeps it from dominating my feed on days when I happen to bookmark a lot of sites.

I hadn't heard of FeedRoll until Ross mentioned it, but it looks to be a pay service, so I'm sticking with my current (100% free) setup.

[Pat Rock]

2 RSS feed for the sidebar. This is what Mark Pilgrim did and it worked wonderfully for him.

Just make sure and promote it every once in a while so people get the message and subscribe to it.

[Joe Clark]

Why sit around waiting for Ben and Mena to implement a feature that WordPress already has?

Besides, WordPress is free and open-source. Betting on Movable Type is rather like betting on Microsoft-- sinking your own work into somebody else's format that you have to pay for in the first place.

[theglobalchinese]

Am I right in the hypothesis that RSS Feed is nothing else than a HTML kind of a newsletter, where the headlines appear and invite to read whatever one likes to? Of course, the official definition would rather be that Really Simple Syndication belongs to a family of XML based web-content distribution and republication (Web syndication) protocols primarily used by news sites and weblogs. But really, what is this else than a HTML kind of a newsletter?

[Chris Anderson]

I'd say the main differences between an RSS feed and a HTML newsletter from a content perspective is that newsletters tend to deliver their content in aggregated collections of entries on some kind of schedule determined by the publisher, while RSS feeds deliver individual posts when they are written. You can organize and repackage those items in any way you want, including your own custom newsletter.

Of course, there are also technical transport differences between html newsletters, which are delivered via email, and feeds, which are automatically pulled from the individual sites by client software.

[Mark Carter]

Speaking of RSS being integrated into the browser... if you're using Mozilla Firefox, it has a feature called Live Bookmarks. Basically, if a site is RSS-enabled, an icon will show in the bottom right corner of your browser window. Clicking on this lets you subcribe to the RSS feed (the process of which is identical to creating a bookmark), which is stored with the rest of your Bookmarks. I created a RSS Feeds bookmark folder where I save all my Live Bookmarks. It's a convenient system, very easy to use.

[Joshua Wood]

I think ling tail explains why search engines love blogs. Each posting is extremely focused on a particular subject that is not necessarily related to the site as a whole. As a result you begin to capture traffic from outside of your target audience because you may have written an article about your spaghetti dinner in great detail. I just posted a longer article on this idea at Everything eCommerce This whole concept of long tail has really gotten me excited about the possibilties and direction of online commerce.

[Greg Linden]

Chris writes: The problem with RSS is that it isn't a marketplace.

The issue here is more with RSS readers than with RSS. Current RSS readers organize articles by RSS feed, so you see every post from each source.

Next generation RSS readers will split up the posts and prioritize by importance and interest.

For example, take a look at Findory, our personalized news and weblog reader. It learns your interests, searches thousands of sources, and surfaces the interesting news and weblog articles.

[praktike]

Here's another option that I use: I browse RSS feeds using Bloglines, and I created a "clippings" blog that I use to keep a running log of articles and posts I come across but don't really have anything to say about. Then I use Drupal's aggregator and display the RSS feed of the clippings blog on my site.

Here's the clippings blog:
http://www.bloglines.com/blog/praktike

And here's the site:
http://www.liberalsagainstterrorism.com/drupal/

[shayne]

We added our sidebar using a del.icio.us feed. Using Feedburner, it integrates nicely with our RSS feed.

[Dee Rambeau]

Chris, your comments on quality over quantity certainly apply to some bloggers, who are apparently more interested in traffic and link count than they are in making some sense. Thanks for your longish and thoughtful posts. I've got the "crammers" eliminated from my Reader by actively deleting them!

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[kim]

Once they've won you as a RSS subscriber, it requires an active decision on your part to unsubscribe.

[456465]

However, didn't Hayek condemn right wing totalitarianism as well as that on the left? For sure, most examples came from the left, but deep down inside he was merely anti-totalitarian.
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