Sunday, September 11, 2005
I am my only subscriber
I knew it would happen someday: I'm down from my all-time high of four Bloglines subscribers to just one--myself, and I only subscribe to see how many subscribers I have. I know that people use other aggregators, of course, and since I disabled comments instead of just updating my template so that Blogger's delete feature would work (so I could delete comment spam, which I was getting hit with at the time) there's no real incentive for participation or anything.
On a somewhat related note, have you ever tried to explain RSS to people? My co-workers would LOVE RSS if they would ever actually try it out. They're all highly technical people in highly technical jobs, and yet their eyes glaze over when you try to explain even something as simple as Bloglines. They see "blog" in the title and think it's some kind of thing where people post anecdotes about their dogs (which some of my Bloglines subscriptions are, as a matter of fact). I think Bloglines needs a new name, and I think we need a new model for RSS aggregators. Thunderbird's built-in RSS capabilities are a good start--if reading RSS feeds was actually as easy as reading e-mail, I think more people would do it. Unfortunately, it's difficult to use the aggregator in Thunderbird because every feed seems to display differently, probably due to the differences in feed-generation standards (RSS, XML, Atom, etc.).
I don't really care that I don't have a lot of subscribers, but it does make me wonder sometimes about the compulsion to blog. Why do we do it? I used to do a blog that was about work-related issues, but when I lost all interest in the issues and was only blogging about my job, I took it down. I mainly use this one for myself--to remember that neat knitting pattern I found or the cool site about Lustron houses. I tried del.icio.us for a while, but as an odd form of morning sickness, I started getting dizzy and nauseated just looking at del.icio.us during my first trimester and had to stop using it.
I have to give a talk on blogs in a few weeks. Perhaps this is a question I will ask the participants: why do you think people keep blogs? What are some reasons you keep a blog (or would like to)? Conversely, why do people stop blogging?
On a somewhat related note, have you ever tried to explain RSS to people? My co-workers would LOVE RSS if they would ever actually try it out. They're all highly technical people in highly technical jobs, and yet their eyes glaze over when you try to explain even something as simple as Bloglines. They see "blog" in the title and think it's some kind of thing where people post anecdotes about their dogs (which some of my Bloglines subscriptions are, as a matter of fact). I think Bloglines needs a new name, and I think we need a new model for RSS aggregators. Thunderbird's built-in RSS capabilities are a good start--if reading RSS feeds was actually as easy as reading e-mail, I think more people would do it. Unfortunately, it's difficult to use the aggregator in Thunderbird because every feed seems to display differently, probably due to the differences in feed-generation standards (RSS, XML, Atom, etc.).
I don't really care that I don't have a lot of subscribers, but it does make me wonder sometimes about the compulsion to blog. Why do we do it? I used to do a blog that was about work-related issues, but when I lost all interest in the issues and was only blogging about my job, I took it down. I mainly use this one for myself--to remember that neat knitting pattern I found or the cool site about Lustron houses. I tried del.icio.us for a while, but as an odd form of morning sickness, I started getting dizzy and nauseated just looking at del.icio.us during my first trimester and had to stop using it.
I have to give a talk on blogs in a few weeks. Perhaps this is a question I will ask the participants: why do you think people keep blogs? What are some reasons you keep a blog (or would like to)? Conversely, why do people stop blogging?
permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 2:53 AM 
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