Monday, October 26, 2009

RSS or Visit the Page?

Today, Gamer Geek and I were reminded why visiting a website is still important. XKCD, a favorite webcomic of ours, redesigned the entire page to look like an old-school Geocities website...complete w/ under construction signs & broken links. If you've been on the web long enough, you've seen these pages (heck, you're probably had one of these pages. I know I did!)

RSS is great for reading blogs & news, but you can miss out on the creativity of a site. There's also been a long debate that RSS kills the very sites you're reading. Why? By not going to the site, you cause them traffic but fail to bring them ad revenue or ever buy their stuff. I'm not going to debate this point, I'm just mentioning it.

BTW: Just RSS my blogs. I don't care!

4 comments:

gamer-geek said...

RSS totally replaced my old list of bookmarks to visit - what a hassle that was! I do notice that one method many use to keep traffic going to the actual webpage is to have just a link to the new post, or just the first X-hundred characters or something. Seems to work pretty well, I get an idea of what the update is, and saves me from having to check every day.

Nothing Knew said...

I allow an atom feed for my personal blog. That way people can read it where they'd like to read it. I don't care since I make no money on it.

On my "money making" <heavy sarcasm> blogs I usually only post the title, since the content is normally quite short. That makes people click through.

I do have an experiment on one of them where I only use the adsense feed ads and allow the entire post to show in the feed. It is actually making more $$ than the website.

I have about twice as many people reading that blog via the RSS than the site itself. What I really need to do is create a mobile optimized one but, since I got a job, who has the time?

BTW, I have ~700 feeds in Google Reader. I might look at 30-40 of them in a day...some days I cull through another 100 just to see if I missed anything. Google's new "magic" sorting really helps with that.

LRNs said...

I have a lot of RSS feeds too (nowhere near that many) and tend to read what I want then cull the rest too. Some feeds are also just there to warn me when something has updated, ex: Netflix has an RSS of new releases.

Nothing Knew said...

I collect RSS feeds like some people collect bookmarks (well I collect the bookmarks too but that doesn't invalidate my premise).

So when I find a site I like more than a couple posts on I add it to my feed reader. Then a few times a year I drop 10-20 of them...so the number is always expanding but does step back every so often.

I have the Netflix new releases feed as well...but I don't have Netflix. Come to your own conclusion as to why.