This morning I attended a neighborhood meeting and ran into a fellow blogger who was there. He focuses on blogging about our city, or what some call “hyper local blogging”, and in the past we’ve had some great discussions about our city and region both offline, and in his blog comments.
However, we haven’t interacted in quite a few months and he asked me why he hadn’t seen me in the comments of his blog lately. It was a bit awkward for me, but I decided to just be honest with him. So, I explained that while I always enjoyed his blog and our discussions, I had to remove his blog feed from my reader a few months back when he switched from publishing full stories to just summaries through RSS.
Like most people, I have a ton of constraints on my time, and with over 350 blogs that I try to keep up with between news, friends, politics and the various industries that I’m involved in–I just don’t have time to click-thru for every full story.
360 Google Reader Subscriptions as of July 20, 2009
I also do a lot of my feed browsing/reading on mobile devices through the day, and having to click-thru to each blog that publishes just summary feeds is a pain in the backside on a hand-held.
So, I simply don’t subscribe (or keep subscriptions) to sites that only publish summary feeds.
He was put off by my position, and countered with “what about all the good stuff you’re going to miss out on?”
I’ve heard this all before, in-fact a very popular Tech blogger made the same argument to me last year at a Christmas party, but I’ve thought about this on my own and the conclusion I came to was this: if it’s that important I’ll hear about it on one of the other related blogs that I am following (because they publish full story feeds), and if it’s not that important than I’ll never miss what I didn’t know existed.
You see, my position is simple, as a blog reader I’m an information consumer and it’s not up to me to seek your product out. You, as the product producer, need to understand my needs and make your product fit them.
I understand that everybody wants page views, and revenue is traffic driven online, but here’s the deal. If I subscribe to your feed and you publish something that grabs my attention, I will click-thru from the full story to see if there are any comments posted at your blog, because the comments often hold better stuff than the actual stories do.
Or, if your posting prompts me to want to add something, I’ll click-thru just to post a comment of my own on your blog.
In other words, if you create a quality product, I will still come to your site and interact with you. All I ask is that you make your product available for me on my terms in the first place so that I can decide if it’s “quality” or not before hand. Don’t ask me to waste my time clicking-thru on every posting you publish in order to make that determination by offering a summary feed. If you do, you will lose me for not respecting the value of my time.
A quality blog will not suffer from publishing a full story feed, on the contrary I believe it will grow because of it.
The only questions is, do you trust your content to attract click-thrus and interaction or not? Well, do you punk? (Sorry, just watched Dirty Harry again over the weekend and couldn’t resist)
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