Feed splicing = content dilution?
Matt Haughey complains about stinky links in other people’s feeds, even though he himself has been splicing up his feed for a while:
After five years of doing this, I never thought I’d be reduced to handfuls of interesting links sprinkled with a dab of jokey commentary.
Dave Shea chimes in and makes a good point:
I’d much prefer low volume and high signal, to frequent updates with content I don’t really care about.
Tom Coates agrees as well and blames the software:
[...] all I can say is that I couldn’t agree more. My RSS feed at the moment is a monstrous atrocity. It’s vile and clumsy and ugly and infuriating. But it’s as vile as it is because that’s where the software and systems that I want and need to use have led me.
In his excellent post Tom presents “the history of all weblog functionality in a nutshell”, describing how the tools we use shape the way we write and communicate and that the growing trend of what i like to think of as “personal online identity consolidation” has a long way to go. Funny enough, Matt Haughey was one of the first i saw proposing this consolidation, and while i see value in this for personal purposes, it’s not necessarily in the best interest of your readers as Matt acknowledges in his followup.
I did something like this myself for a few weeks when i switched my linklog from diy to delicious, splicing daily digests from delicious into both my site and feed. Today i believe it was the worst change i made to this side in its short history.
It didn’t sit right with me to mirror all this stuff (remember, redundancy is bad for your mental well-being), when delicious generously shares and exposes my data through various rss feeds and its api.
More importantly, it fundamentally changed the way i used my weblog because i stopped writing shorter pieces about stuff i found interesting and stuffed them into my linklog instead. At the same time i thought of the linklog entries as second class content and tried to avoid posting daily links after daily links and keep some “quality content” above the fold, therefore burdening myself to write something and paralyzing myself to post quick links. Delicious with its low barrier to posting simply doesn’t work as a publishing tool for me. This ultimately led to my recent changes around here and i feel a lot better about my site since then.
Coming back to Dave’s remarks about damaging the signal-to-noise ratio of content, this reminded me of a post at the long tail weblog about how rss fundamentally changes writing/reading habits through its quasi-push nature:
[I]n a subscription age, where publishers don’t have to entice you back each day with a flood of new content, quality trumps quantity. [...] The risk is no longer of losing readers with an an insufficient volume of posts, but of annoying readers with insufficiently interesting posts.
Something to keep in mind in the age of rss and web content syndication.
Somewhat related: Giving up control, in which i expound why i trust delicious and flickr with my personal data.
Would you like to comment or share this post?
Tell me what you think on Twitter: Tweet
