Head Tale

I was looking at my blog stats today and started thinking about RSS (really simple syndication for anyone who doesn't know – a technology that allows you to use an external source – either your e-mail client or a web site or a piece of software or whatever) to track your favourite sites. 

So, if you use RSS, you don't have to manually visit this site to see if I've posted that day or not.  Instead, you can use your RSS reader to track this site (and many others all at once) to see at a glance via a single interface if there any updates to any site you follow, usually via a brief title and a excerpt from the post appearing in the RSS reader. 

It's a great technology and makes it easy for me to follow dozens of web sites when in the past, I might have only followed a few on a regular basis.  But I also realise it has some significant downsides…

– most RSS readers (okay, the one I use does this so I'm happy to generalize about all of them ) only show new posts and don't show comments.  So you're less likely to read the comments on a blog (or even know if a post *has* comments) and that's often where the most entertaining, informative content is to be found.

– this probably also discourages readers from becoming active participants themselves if they're not right there with the “Submit Comment” button in front of them (I know I'm as guilty of this as anyone with the blogs of friends that I follow via RSS but rarely comment on.  Sorry all!)

– if you don't at least occasionally visit the blog directly, you also won't know if the blogger has added new widgets or other features.  For example, I have a feed of my del.icio.us bookmarks on my blog and often post interesting articles there that I find but don't want to devote a full blog entry to.  Unless you visit my blog directly (or subscribe to the RSS feed for my del.icio.us content specifically – yes, it gets that convoluted), you don't see those articles.  I also recently added a widget that shows where people are visiting my site from geographically.  But for many readers, this is probably the first time they even know I did this.

– you also don't see if people have redesigned the look of their site visually unless they tell you in a blog post that shows up in your RSS feed that they've done so.

By far, the largest number of referrers I get to my site are from Google Reader and Bloglines, two of the main RSS providers.  So, it's hard to tell with my stats package, but I'd guess that RSS readers outnumber direct visitors by 2:1 and possibly even 3:1.  (And don't even get me started on Facebook – I syndicate my content there too but am constantly doubting whether this is a wise thing or not for all kinds of reasons – of which this article is just one (big) example.) 

So yeah, anyhow, the point of all of this is to say that RSS is great (for the most part), I use it all the time (for the most part) and if you use it to visit this site, make sure you stop by directly every once in awhile to see what's new, throw in a comment if you're thusly inspired and see if I ever get brave and decide to change the default style I've had in place for over a year now.